[lg policy] English Is Not Enough

Sat Apr 24 14:52:31 UTC 2010

English Is Not Enough
 Linda Helton for The Chronicle

By Catherine Porter

Many Americans have come to believe, consciously or not, that it's just too
hard to learn a second language. We typically wait until early adolescence
to introduce schoolchildren to their first foreign language. We start with
small doses and don't usually offer, let alone require, extended sequences.
Our teachers have often had a late start themselves and don't always have
much opportunity outside the classroom to extend their own language skills.
Articulation between high-school and college foreign-language programs is
haphazard at best. College students often perceive language requirements as
obstacles to be avoided or impositions to be endured.

Thus, generation after generation, our society produces large numbers of
adult citizens who have never tried to learn another language or who see
themselves as having tried and failed. Is it any wonder that as a society we
think it's not worth the effort and expense to make foreign-language study
an essential component of the public-school curriculum?

But the result is a devastating waste of potential. Researchers in a wide
range of fields increasingly attest to the benefits of bilingualism.
Students who have had an early start in a long-sequence foreign-language
program consistently display enhanced cognitive abilities relative to their
monolingual peers—including pattern recognition, problem solving, divergent
thinking, flexibility, and creativity. After the first three or four years
of second-language instruction, those students perform better on
standardized tests, not only in verbal skills (in both languages) but also
in mathematics. They demonstrate enhanced development in metalinguistic and
critical thinking: They can compare and contrast languages, analyze the way
language functions in different contexts, and appreciate the way it can be
used for special purposes, like advertising, political propaganda, fiction,
or poetry. In short, they have a decided edge in the higher-order thinking
skills that will serve them well as college students and citizens.

What accounts for such remarkable benefits? Does foreign-language study
itself have an impact on brain physiology? While there is still a lot we
don't know, intriguing clues are emerging. Experiments have shown, for
example, that foreign-language study increases brain density in the left
inferior parietal cortex. Research also suggests that bilingual people
process languages differently than monolingual people do. They may take
fuller advantage of the neural structures involved in cognitive processing.
They appear to have a greater ability to shut out distractions and focus on
the task at hand. Demands that the language-learning process makes on the
brain, like other demands that involve encountering the unexpected, make the
brain more flexible and incite it to discover new patterns—and thus to
create and maintain more circuits.

The effort involved in learning and controlling more than one language may
even "train the brain" in a way that slows down the losses that so often
come with aging. Indeed, one recent Canadian report indicates that dementia
may be delayed by as much as four years in bilingual adults who use both
languages regularly. Virtually all "brain fitness" experts include
foreign-language study among the activities that may help delay the onset of
dementia.

Although it is never too late to begin or resume foreign-language study, in
principle adults can choose whether or not to pursue it, while the children
in our society must depend on us—on school boards, state legislatures,
federal agencies, educational organizations—to create contexts in which
foreign-language learning can and will occur. Given the enhanced cognitive
capacities attributable to bilingualism, we should do whatever it takes to
make those advantages available to all children, especially now when the
perception is growing that Americans are being outperformed in the
international arena on several measures of educational attainment and are at
risk of losing a crucial competitive advantage. On the worldwide scale, we
are decidedly lagging behind in foreign-language education: According to a
survey by the Center for Applied Linguistics published in 2000, presecondary
foreign-language study was offered in all of the 19 countries responding and
required in 15 of them.

It is true that English has become a lingua franca in many parts of the
world and may suffice for superficial transactions in touristic situations.
But English is not enough for exchanges in diplomatic, military,
professional, or commercial contexts where matters of consequence are at
stake. Whether English-only speakers are dealing with counterparts who speak
their language well or working through interpreters, they are always at a
disadvantage. They risk violating social taboos, tend to miss subtle verbal
and nonverbal cues, and cannot follow side conversations. In general, they
are far less equipped than their bilingual or multilingual interlocutors to
put themselves in others' places or to figure out where others are "coming
from," what they are "getting at," or even trying to "get away with." In
many circumstances, the cultural knowledge and understanding that comes with
mastery of a second language is a prerequisite for being taken seriously.

In an op-ed piece in The New York Times last fall, Thomas L. Friedman cited
a businessman, Todd Martin, who said that "our education failure is the
largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker's global
competitiveness." Friedman went on to say that schools need to send forth
students who not only have adequate skills in reading, writing, and
arithmetic, but who also demonstrate creative problem-solving abilities.
Every child whose ability to think critically and creatively is increased by
the boost in cerebral capacity from sustained foreign-language study is a
future adult who may bring new perspectives to the daunting problems facing
our globalized world—climate change and economic stability being just two
examples. Producing a truly multilingual citizenry would give us a vast pool
of people who can function in at least two languages and learn others
quickly. With the enhanced intercultural awareness that comes with
second-language acquisition, Americans could interact with more sensitivity
and insight in multicultural contexts.

Studies suggest that the ideal "window" for introducing a second language
extends from pre-kindergarten through third grade, partly because of the
well-known plasticity of young brains but also because, as with a first
language, extended exposure is needed for full mastery. Yet according to a
report from the Center for Applied Linguistics, the number of elementary
schools in the United States that offer any foreign-language study decreased
from 31 percent to 25 percent between 1997 and 2008. The report's executive
summary concluded: "When legislators, administrators, and other education
policy makers recognize the need to incorporate foreign languages into the
core curriculum, the necessary funding and other resources will follow."

Professors of modern languages, including English, should be among the first
to recognize that need and embrace the challenge it entails. Imagine a
context—one we could create in less than a generation—in which most entering
college students arrive with 12 or 13 years of sustained, serious
foreign-language study behind them. Instructors of foreign literature and
languages would find students prepared for advanced work if they chose to go
on in the same language or efficient and motivated learners if they chose to
start a new one. English literature and composition instructors would find
that their students had a comparative grasp of the structures of the English
language, an informed appreciation of its capabilities and limitations, and
an approach to their subjects nourished by prior experience with literary
texts from a different tradition. All instructors would find their students
experienced in thinking and talking about language and culture as such, and
accustomed to stepping outside their own systems to compare and contrast as
well as perform other tasks that we commonly associate with critical
thinking.

Experience with more than one language reinforces the insight that language
is a vehicle of expression and representation deployed by speakers and
writers as they construct their own worlds. Each language does the job
differently, puts into play its own approach to filtering perceived
realities and its own tools for individual expression in a
language-structured relation to those realities. To experience the contrast
of differing languages and their distinct expressive resources is to learn
valuable lessons in humility, tolerance, and sensitivity to other peoples
and cultures.

Bilingual people use multiple lenses to view the world; their horizons are
widened and their lives enriched by the ability to embrace difference and
find enjoyment in the play within, between, and around languages that
stepping outside one's mother tongue allows. Few if any intellectual
achievements open more doors in the mind, in the heart, and in the world
than learning to understand and speak another language. And few produce a
more profound or lasting satisfaction—even in the blunders and
misunderstandings that arise in the learning process and regularly
thereafter. Doris Sommer argues in Bilingual Aesthetics (Duke University
Press, 2004) that "living in two or more competing languages troubles the
expectation that communication should be easy, and it upsets the desired
coherence of romantic nationalism and ethnic essentialism. This can be a
good thing." For native speakers of English in the United States, that good
thing too often remains the privilege of an elite.

It is time for us to embrace the mandate put forward in the Modern Language
Association's report to the Teagle Foundation on the undergraduate major in
language and literature. That report asserts decisively that
"multilingualism and multiculturalism have become a necessity for most world
citizens" and that "all students who major in our departments should know
English and at least one foreign language." We should work individually and
collectively, locally and nationally, to have foreign-language study
included as a core subject in elementary schools throughout the country. We
need to make our voices heard in a sustained and vigorous effort to persuade
all stakeholders in the American educational enterprise that English, while
essential, is simply not enough.
http://chronicle.com/article/English-Is-Not-Enough/65136/

[This article has a number of extensive comments made to it, some of which
will interest our readers.  But they can only be
accessed by subscribers.  If anyone wants to see the comments, let me know,
and I'll forward them (HS)]
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Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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