“I’m Sorry. Do You Speak English?”
BY JOE LENOFF
The United States is an economic and military powerhouse, with business interests that span the globe and security concerns that reach just as far, yet according to Gallup, only 34 percent of Americans speak a foreign language “well enough to hold a conversation”. This may sound encouraging, but compared with Europe, where 56 percent of people speak a language other than their own, our 34 percent is troubling. When Americans do study a foreign language, 69 percent choose Spanish, with less than 1 percent of American high school students combined studying Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Farsi, Japanese, Korean, Russian or Urdu. Also, only 25 percent of elementary schools and 58 percent of middle schools have foreign language programs. High schools do better at around 90 percent, but this educational infrastructure is not sufficient to compete on a global scale. If the United States wants to maintain its hegemonic position in the world, it cannot allow this type of intellectual and linguistic subordination.
Why Does This Matter?
There are those who say that it is unnecessary and a misallocation of resources for the government to focus on promoting foreign language education for American children. The rest of the world speaks English anyway, they argue. This is like the child in the back of the math classroom who says that he will never need math in his life. It is a nonsensical argument. The benefits to learning a foreign language, both for the individual and the country at large, are numerous.
Like math, a new language helps you think. Drs. Bialystok and Martin of York University in Canada compared the intelligences of bilingual and monolingual children, and the bilingual children’s performance was consistently better for all cognitive tasks (other than breadth of English vocabulary, but that is solved within a few years). Another study by Drs. An, Keysar, and Hayakawa of the University of Chicago found that people thinking in a foreign language make more rational decisions.
On a more romantic level, Charlemagne famously said, “To speak another language is to possess a second soul.” Knowing a foreign language offers a depth of understanding to a culture and people that is, by definition, totally foreign. Traveling to Indonesia and knowing Bahasa is a totally different experience than traveling and being limited to English. Reading Don Quixote in Spanish or The Count of Monte Cristo in French allows you insight into these great works that is simply unattainable in English. Speaking a foreign language opens doors to experiences otherwise never dreamt of. It expands horizons and multiplies opportunities, but these opportunities are only available to those who are able to seize them.
In the broader sense, every business opportunity in the world should be open to American men and women, but we are limiting ourselves with our foreign language deficit. Of course, the 80 percent of people who cannot speak a foreign language are not isolated to doing business in the United States (with English being the lingua franca for most of the world and with translation services like https://www.translator.com.au being very easily accessible, very few Americas take the effort to learn a new language ), but the monolingual are still unnecessarily handicapped. Businessmen in foreign countries are more likely to do business with someone who speaks their own language. It is a basic sign of respect and sensitivity to the local way of life, and it makes day-to-day operations run more smoothly. Americans need to learn more foreign languages in order to compete more successfully in foreign countries.
Similarly, Americans need to learn more foreign languages so the United States government can communicate and relate to other countries more easily. Diplomacy is always preferable to armed conflict, and the aforementioned understanding and sensitivity to local culture can be crucial to future relations. If the popular view of Americans around the world is that we are arrogant and ignorant, what better way to prove this opinion wrong and than to learn other languages?
There are national security implications to our language deficiencies as well. If Americans do not study the “high-priority languages” so needed by armed and intelligence forces, how are we to defend ourselves from the peoples who communicate in those languages? Tapping an enemy’s telephone line, or reading their emails only works as well as we are able to understand the data coming to us. We are currently unable to perform these or other tasks that require foreign languages, and as a result the intelligence agencies and military are clamoring to hire people who speak foreign languages. National security is one of the core responsibilities of government, and ours is hampered by our own people’s linguistic deficiencies.
What To Do
We need to diversify our efforts. The Hispanophone represents some of the most beautiful and culturally rich countries in the world, with ample business opportunities, and, unfortunately, also threats to the United States. Certainly these countries are important, but they should not represent 69 percent of our grade school foreign language education. We should reflect the United States government’s military and diplomatic pivot to Asia in our foreign language education. For better or worse, the 21st century is going to be defined by the United States-China relationship. There is no reason why we should force our partners across the Pacific, Chinese or otherwise, to speak our language as often as we do now.
The best way to learn a foreign language and culture, better than any class, is immersion. Understanding this, the European Union set up a program called Erasmus where it funds university students to leave their home country and study “abroad” in other member states. It is a rousing success, with 10 percent of students now taking part in some form of foreign study. They are learning their neighbors’ languages, their customs, and their businesses first-hand, and it will help them immeasurably in the coming years. The United States, with only 1 percent of our students studying abroad, pales next to European performance. Our government should take a hard look at establishing a program similar to Erasmus in the United States.
It is also crucial that either the federal or state governments encourage and subsidize more primary school programs around the United States. As anyone who has attempted to learn a language in high school or university can attest, learning is easiest when you are young. Our current infrastructure does not demonstrate this. We need to make foreign language education in our elementary schools at least as common as it currently is in our high schools. More students need to have the opportunity for success from an early age.
Governor Markell introduced a program in Delaware that seems promising. By 2020, according to the Delaware Department of Education, 20 percent of Delaware elementary schools are going to have a partial immersion program in either Mandarin or Spanish, with incentives for the student to continue their studies throughout grade school. This program offers a real chance to improve foreign language education from the ground-up. We should track the program’s progress and replicate it nationwide if it produces successful results.
The United States is placing itself at a disadvantage with its foreign language deficit. The benefits to the individual, the economy, and the country are substantial, yet we still are not instituting changes that would see Americans speak more than just English. I propose that we diversify, we immerse, and we expand, and I propose we do so now. Faisons-le!