[lg policy] How Acquiring and Using another Language?

[Harold Schiffman]

How Acquiring and Using another Language?

Because of this concern for the nation’s seemingly invisible language
needs, foreign language scholars and organizations have stressed that
a national language policy should advocate and materially support all
languages, not just those deemed “critical” by the U.S. military and
intelligence communities. Pratt, for one, warns that foreign language
scholars must “make themselves heard as advocates not for particular
languages but for the importance of knowing languages and of knowing
the world through languages” as an important dimension of citizenship.
Similarly, the Joint National Committee for Languages and the National
Council for Languages and International Studies acknowledges that a
national language policy should address the nation’s security needs,
but it also calls for this policy to position foreign language
education as a “core academic subject” because “study of and through
another language Juicy Couture Watch enhances learning through
improved cognitive development, transferable reading skills, [and]
reinforcement of other subject areas”.

In making these arguments, foreign language scholars attempt to
broaden the national language policy’s working definition of
“language” so that it guides educational programs according to a
vision of each particular language as a unique lens that refracts a
person’s perceptions. The utilitarian view of foreign languages that
Pratt and others contest can been seen most clearly in President Bush
and DoD leaders’ talk about languages being military tools. U.S.
Colonel Michael R. Simone of the Defense Language Institute stated
this view most bluntly when he declared, “Language is our weapon.”
Simone’s assertion suggests that U.S. political and military leaders
see foreign languages as tools used to ascertain and translate
information and to kill terrorists. In making this argument, Simone
reinscribes what Min-Zhan Lu calls a “commodity approach” toward
language learning and use. This perspective on language, Lu argues,
has “locked our attention” on identifying what language “tools” one
needs while ignoring how individuals’ languages choices have “real
consequences for [their] well-being”. As Lu contends, this utilitarian
perspective on language learning and language use works to reassure
people “that we can simply ‘ease in and out’ of disparate social
domains, languages, englishes, discourses, prototypical selfhoods,
relations with others and the world in the same way one picks up and
puts down a tool (or slips into and out of a dress) without any ‘real’
effects on one’s Authentic Selfhood”. By reinforcing this “commodity
approach” toward language acquisition, the national security language
policy defines “effective” language use in a way that all but ignores
the need for critical engagement with the cultural and linguistic
Juicy Couture Nacklaces contexts that influence how one can and wants
to use the language within his or her personal, professional, and
civic lives.

Moreover, it denies how acquiring and using another language, although
it does not determine one’s sense of political, cultural, and social
identity, does create possibilities for one to negotiate these
identities in new ways and to reshape one’s relations to other
cultures. Scholars must advocate for more complex understandings of
language acquisition and use in order to ensure that a national
language policy provides sufficient material support for a range of
foreign language education programs, kindergarten through graduate
education that give students time to develop this critical dimension
to language use.

http://usteacher.biz/2010/12/how-acquiring-and-using-another-language-2/

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