[EDLING:1363] THE FOREIGN-LANGUAGE CHALLENGE: What America Must Do to Achieve Competence

[Francis M Hult]

via lg-policy...

> >From the issue dated March 24, 2006
> http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i29/29b01001.htm
> 
> THE FOREIGN-LANGUAGE CHALLENGE
> What America Must Do to Achieve Competence
> By RONALD D. LIEBOWITZ
> 
> At the U.S. University Presidents Summit on International Education, in
> January, which I attended, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and
> Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings set out to make Americans'
> foreign-language competency a central component of U.S. national policy.
> If what they proposed comes to fruition, the United States would be more
> secure and better able to compete in the global marketplace. Americans
> would also engage the world in a fundamentally different way with more
> linguistic and cultural competence and, as a result, with greater
> confidence.
> 
> The summit emphasized, in the words of Karen Hughes, under secretary of
> state for public diplomacy and public affairs, the government's and higher
> education's common interest in "seeking investment in educating globally
> competitive U.S. students to work in fields of international interest."
> Concurrently, President Bush launched the National Security Language
> Initiative, described as "a plan to further strengthen national security
> and prosperity in the 21st century through education, especially in
> developing foreign-language skills." Such a plan to develop a far more
> linguistically competent American population is unparalleled; working out
> the details will not be easy. The program is first and foremost about
> national security and positioning the United States to avoid serious
> intelligence gaps like those it experienced leading up to September 11,
> 2001. But it is also about our country's ability to compete globally in
> business, diplomacy, scientific research, and other creative endeavors. A
> major goal of the program is to produce 2,000 advanced speakers of
> critical languages including Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Farsi, Hindi, and
> several Central Asian languages by 2009.
> 
> As president of Middlebury College, an institution known for its
> excellence in language teaching and for preparing so many of our country's
> secondary-school language teachers, I naturally support publicizing the
> need to increase linguistic competency. However, it is precisely my
> institution's expertise in language education that makes me realize that
> the new program must ultimately focus on K-12 rather than postsecondary
> education if the country is to develop and sustain a significant number of
> linguistically competent citizens. Research shows that people must begin
> serious language study well before college in order to become competent at
> the level sought through the program. However, because the United States
> unlike many European and Asian countries has never made it a priority to
> encourage its citizens to learn foreign languages, there is an obvious
> shortage of Americans who can speak and teach the critical languages that
> President Bush has identified.
> 
> Middlebury's experience in trying to expand the size of its Arabic school,
> an intensive nine-week summer program, is illustrative. Our campus could
> easily accommodate 400 students in the program each summer, but because of
> the shortage of qualified teachers of Arabic, we have been unable to make
> space for more than 120 students. The situation for Chinese, according to
> a recent report by the Asia Society, is not much better, nor is it for
> Farsi, Hindi, and the increasingly strategic languages of Central Asia. A
> major question, then, is who will teach those who are supposed to become
> the advanced speakers of the critical languages? The Bush administration
> recognizes the challenge: The new program calls for increasing the number
> of foreign-language teachers by establishing a National Language Service
> Corps. However, the question still remains: Who will teach those who will
> eventually make up such a corps?
> 
> When the scarcity of teachers was mentioned at the summit, a State
> Department representative could say only that developing a national online
> clearinghouse would deliver foreign-language distance-education resources
> to teachers and students to fill the void. Such resources would be useful
> to speakers who have attained a certain level of proficiency, but learning
> languages especially the critical languages, whose structure is
> particularly complex requires significant face-to-face instruction, beyond
> even the best available online resources. The United States cannot produce
> a large number of speakers of the critical languages in a short period of
> time. Colleges and universities should help to the extent they can, but
> because their capacities are limited and distributed over many campuses,
> it is important that the Bush administration's program not be a "let a
> thousand flowers bloom" sort of program. By distributing the $114-million
> proposed for foreign-language education from kindergarten to college to a
> large number of institutions, the program would probably yield fewer
> results than if larger sums were allocated to a small group of
> participants whose expertise and resources can complement one another's
> and help create the best road map for the future. Therefore, before
> allocating the funds, the appropriate federal agencies should convene a
> group of college administratorspresidents, provosts, and deanswhose
> institutions specialize in language pedagogy to collaborate on creating
> the strongest possible infrastructure to meet the short-term goals of the
> program.
> 
> Beyond asking colleges and universities to use their collective resources
> to produce a new cadre of speakers of critical languages, we must begin
> what will be the long process of changing the way Americans view the
> teaching and learning of foreign languages. Language programs must begin
> before college, preferably in elementary school. Some school systems have
> already recognized the strategic significance of critical-language study.
> Approximately 3,000 K-12 students in Chicago now study Chinese, and a
> growing number of school districts on the West Coast offer classes in
> Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Such programs, especially because they
> challenge the conventional thinking and practice of most Americans, need
> support from multiple sources, including private donors, corporations, and
> nonprofit foundations.
> 
> Federal and state governments should offer assistance as well, at far
> greater levels than they currently do. While the West Coast and Chicago
> programs are laudable, only about 24,000 students out of more than 50
> million American schoolchildren participate in them, according to the
> Department of Education. In contrast, hundreds of millions of Chinese
> students are required to study English. Studies have repeatedly shown that
> children's brains are ripe for language learning at an early age, but
> American schools are missing that opportunity: As of 1997, according to
> the most recent survey by the Center for Applied Linguistics, less than 15
> percent of elementary-school students were studying a foreign language,
> compared to almost 52 percent of high-school students. And of course, many
> students are lost to attrition before they attain advanced competency in
> their language, so to establish the National Language Service Corps, or
> meet the goals of the program, we will need many thousands more young
> students enrolled in language classes.
> 
> We might look to the Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth
> as a model for recruiting high-achieving language learners. The center
> identifies students of great promise in a wide range of subjects from
> grades two through seven. Although it does not offer immersion programs in
> foreign language, designing such a curriculum for those talented students
> could play an important role in increasing the country's linguistic
> competency. The Bush administration has taken a bold first step in
> identifying one of the great challenges facing American politics and
> society in the 21st century: how to significantly increase Americans'
> foreign-language competency. Will it work? The answer depends on whether
> the country can plan and create the short-term and long-term structures
> necessary to bring about a cultural shift in Americans' view of learning
> languages, and on how deep the commitment to that change proves to be
> among the multiple sectors of American society.
> 
> Ronald D. Liebowitz is president of Middlebury College.
> 
> http://chronicle.com
> Section: The Chronicle Review
> Volume 52, Issue 29, Page B10