Foreign Language

Not a foreign concept

FHS, other high schools should offer more foreign language courses in school

Andrew Haughey haughand000@hsestudents.org

In the world, there are approximately 6,500 distinct languages spoken. At FHS, there are three foreign languages taught. This is not to say that the three languages that are taught are not important, as Spanish, French and German have 945 million speakers combined worldwide, but rather to say that the selection of languages is lackluster. Spanish is the most widely spoken language of those offered at the school but still falls behind Mandarin Chinese and Hindi (as well as English) in its number of speakers.

For students who want to learn languages besides those offered directly through the school, they must navigate an online program through Ball State University. The program offers Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and Latin. Although this is a good start, it is made very clear that no supervision or assistance will be provided by HSE staff and that the learning will be entirely asynchronous. Doing this goes against the very nature of language itself: communication. If students have no teacher or peers to communicate with in their learned language, how can they be expected to learn any applicable skills? After all, most situations in which a foreign language is needed do not take place through a screen where Google Translate can be utilized.

Before the technicalities of implementing additional foreign languages into schools can be addressed, both the psychological and tangible benefits must be discussed. According to H. Jarold Weatherford, a reporter for the Center for Applied Linguistics, learning a foreign language can help an individual advance in the job market, empathize with people from different cultures and enjoy international travel more. In a 2014 study performed by the Coalition for International Education, nearly 30% of U.S. business executives reported having missed out on some opportunity due to a lack of on-staff language skills, proving that language learning is lucrative. Furthermore, there is a direct correlation between students who studied foreign language in high school and higher SAT scores as analyzed by The Admission Testing Program of College Board. In short, any foreign language study will have some sort of beneficial effect on the learner’s life.

Despite the benefits of learning languages, most American schools tend to offer the same three: Spanish, French and German. Students who want to learn others are forced to resort to private programs that may be expensive or not effective. Most of these programs are online, much like those offered through HSE schools and Ball State. Although online programs typically seem like a good alternative to a traditional classroom setting, the truth is that most classes are dumbed down to make learning easier to manage while asynchronous.

The idea of online learning is that it is done on someone’s own schedule without a teacher telling them what to do and when to do it, but the reality is that removing the teacherstudent dynamic makes learning much more difficult. This is reflected by a study performed by California State University-San Bernardino. The study showed that students who participated in an online course finished with a grade point value that was 0.25 points lower on average than the students who completed the course traditionally. Additionally, the study showed that about 10.3% of students taking online courses failed the course compared to only 4% of students who completed the course traditionally. This evidence proves that learning online is not an effective replacement for the diverse interactions that a classroom offers. For foreign languages, the lack of verbal communication to practice sentence structure and pronunciation likely makes the number of students who gain any sort of applicable skill much lower than a normal class.

While simply teaching more foreign languages in traditional classrooms across the U.S. seems like a valid solution, the problem becomes more complex when the shortage of foreign language teachers in the country is taken into account. From 1997 to 2008, there was a steep drop in the number of middle schools that offered foreign languages, from 75% to 58%, according to a study performed by the American Academy of Arts and Science (AAAS). This decline is a reflection of the reality of foreign language teaching: good teachers are hard to come by. As schools tend to analyze more factors - such as previous professions and highest degree attained - in a teacher’s application to make the best decision, the number of individuals who view the job as something they really want to do has declined. In the 2016-17 school year, there were 44 states and the District of Columbia that had a shortage of qualified foreign language instructors, according to the same report by AAAS. These are the factors that make teaching more foreign languages harder, and, in some regions, impossible.

While the expansion of traditional language teaching is a complex issue, it is absolutely necessary if the HSE school district wants to effectively prepare its students for the future. As the world shifts closer to a global economy, individuals will fall behind if they cannot expand their opportunities beyond English or whatever their first language may be.