FYI: Article on heritage language learners

[Scott McGinnis]

The following from this past Sunday's WASHINGTON POST, as posted by Kim
Nguyen-Lam at CSULB.

      The Answer Is On the Tip of Our Many Tongues



      Geoffrey Nunberg
      Washington Post
      Sunday, December 9, 2001

      PALO ALTO, Calif.---FBI director Robert Mueller exposed one of the
most glaring deficiencies in our intelligence capabilities when he made
a public appeal for translators of Arabic, Farsi and Pashto, which some
people took as the occasion to criticize foreign-language programs in
American schools and universities. If the war on terrorism awakens some
students and school administrators to the importance of language study,
so much the better. But it would be a mistake to lay responsibility for
our lack of strategic language resources chiefly with schools or
universities -- or to believe they are in a position to rectify the
problem.

      We need instead to take advantage of the resources that the
promise of America has brought to our shores -- children who are growing
up speaking those languages in cities across the country, from
Alexandria and Brooklyn to San Francisco. The Census Bureau estimates
that 40,000 Afghans are living in America, the majority of them ethnic
Pashtuns, and others put the figures several times higher. Our lack of
linguistic expertise is not a new problem -- nor one that will go away
soon. The FBI has acknowledged that it could have had warnings of the
1993 World Trade Center bombing from intercepted tapes and notebooks in
Arabic if it had had the resources to translate them; similarly, the
United States could have known ahead of time about the 1998 nuclear
tests in India and Pakistan if it had been able to translate information
in its possession.

      .......................

      What was really sad about the FBI's appeal for Arabic and Pashto
translators is that, of all countries, the United States is not short of
speakers of those languages, both in the form of recent immigrants and,
more importantly, their bilingual children, who satisfy the citizenship
and residency requirements that national security demands of its
language experts.

      In fact, given the broad linguistic backgrounds of American
immigrants (the Department of Education estimates that more than 100
languages are spoken by students in the Fairfax County public schools
alone), we ought to be in a unique position to deal with any linguistic
challenges that world events might throw our way. Albanian, Tagalog,
Somali, Uzbek, Tamil -- whatever the language of the next hot spot, we
will have thousands of speakers of it in our own backyard.

      That linguistic competence wouldn't be lost to us if we instituted
a national heritage language program aimed at helping the children of
immigrants maintain and develop their fluency and literacy in their
native tongues. Such a program could make use of resources ranging from
Internet discussion groups to summer programs. It would help students
develop knowledge of technical and business language, not simply the
domestic vocabulary they use at home. And in communities of immigrants,
the best model would be two-way immersion programs in elementary
schools, like those already established for languages such as Mandarin,
Japanese and Russian.

      The principle here is no different from what the Bush
administration has been arguing in its energy policy: It's a lot easier
to cultivate existing resources than to develop new ones. But that
approach would require a reversal in American attitudes toward
bilingualism -- a change from the concerted effort of recent years to
eliminate bilingual education programs, even those aimed at easing the
transition to English. In Dearborn, Mich., which has some schools in
which 90 percent of students speak Arabic, school superintendent Jeremy
Hughes proposed an Arabic-English program in 1995. But the local school
board shelved the plan after intense criticism from critics of bilingual
education; and it was only three years ago that a 30-student pilot
program could be established using federal funds.

      The English-only movement has encouraged the belief that
assimilation necessarily involves giving up a foreign tongue. It leaves
us in an odd
position: We encourage the children of immigrants to become monolingual,
then lament when there's no one available to translate the very
languages these students grew up speaking.

      Over the past century, America's attitude toward foreign-language
learning has changed several times. At the turn of the 20th century,
more than 6 percent of American schoolchildren were receiving most or
all of their primary education in the German language alone. Those
programs were eliminated around the time of World War I -- the
casualties of an overreaction to the dangers posed by foreign-born
radicals and subversives.

      Out of that fear grew the doctrine that a loyal American couldn't
serve two linguistic masters. In upholding a 1919 Nebraska law that
barred elementary school instruction in foreign languages, the Nebraska
Supreme Court warned against the "baneful effects" of educating children
in foreign languages, which must "naturally inculcate in them the ideas
and sentiments foreign to the best interests of their country." In
recent years many of the bilingual programs established in the '70s and
'80s have been scaled down or terminated as a result of the English-only
movement (whose partisans have been sharply critical of the Arabic
bilingual programs in the Dearborn public schools).

      Nations such as Belgium, Switzerland, Finland and even Australia
have made the maintenance of native languages an educational priority
without hampering students' mastery of their official national
languages. And American ethnic and religious minorities have long
supported private programs aimed at making children fluent in languages
such as Chinese and Hebrew without inhibiting their assimilation to
English, or for that matter, their unqualified patriotism.

      Whatever progress we make in encouraging native English speakers
to learn foreign languages, America will never reach the levels of
multilingual proficiency that are routine in regions like Northern
Europe -- or provide in schools the opportunity to learn languages that
the security agencies now require. To many Americans, the worldwide
dominance of English makes foreign-language skills seem a luxury rather
than a necessity here. But that's all the more reason to help the
children of immigrants maintain their parents' languages. If Sept. 11
has taught us anything, it's that those skills are too important to be
sacrificed in the name of cultural uniformity.

      Geoffrey Nunberg is a scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research
Center and a consulting professor of linguistics at Stanford University.
His most recent book is "The Way We Talk Now" (Houghton Mifflin).