It may be too early to teach foreign policy in high school, but when it comes to foreign language, high school borders on being too late.
Around the Valley, as a new school year nears, educators say they wish they could afford to enrich their foreign language offerings beyond Spanish and French – but struggle to do so.
Students and parents may not be clamoring for classes in Arabic, Russian or German. Nonetheless, schools are missing an opportunity to give coming generations a leg up on global competitiveness and to shape a citizenry that understands countries and cultures at the forefront of change, or of crisis.
This fall, in a small victory, Easthampton is bringing back a World Language program that will expose students in grades 5 through 7 to Spanish and French, the two languages that dominate high school studies in Massachusetts. Younger students are known to pick up languages more readily, so even limited time spent trying out phrases in another tongue can awaken skills that prepare them to accelerate learning later on.
As Gazette reporter Sarah Crosby explained in a story last week, Spanish is hands-down the dominant foreign language taught in state high schools, easily topping the second-place language, French. It is reassuring to see that in the 2014-2015 school year, 184,168 high school students in Massachusetts were developing their proficiency in Spanish. Comfort with that language will not only help young people on the world stage; it can provide connective tissue within the United States, given the rise of Hispanic and Latino cultures here.
We’re less pleased to see that in that same school year, only 406 students in the whole state studied Arabic and just 204 took Russian. Granted, these are more difficult languages that use different alphabets. But both continue to carry enormous influence in world affairs.
Mark Jackson, principal of the Amherst-Pelham Regional High School, said he felt a sense of loss when his program had to cut German and Russian for financial reasons, though it remains one of the few schools to offer Mandarin Chinese. Last year, President Obama issued a call to have one million students studying Mandarin by the end of the decade. The Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter Public School in Hadley is doing its part to help reach that goal, but few traditional public high schools have been able to match Amherst in offering this option.
One local superintendent noted last week that it is hard for schools to change the mix on foreign languages they offer for a simple reason: Because these courses build fluency year by year, students can be left stranded if a school shifts resources from one language to another. Given tight financing in public education, this remains a zero-sum game. Budget limits don’t give educators the freedom to add languages at will.
Fortunately, schools that accept the challenge of expanding their foreign language instruction have an ace in the hole.
It is easy, and relatively affordable, to connect students with highly regarded software that provides language training, such as Rosetta Stone. At Hampshire Regional High School, students have enrolled in interactive online classes in German, Japanese and Mandarin in which they are guided in conversational practice. That isn’t the same as chatting in person with a native or expert speaker in a foreign language, but it can help students feel out their aptitude for this sort of study – and perhaps move on to fluency.
All the above speaks to the practical side to foreign language study. But there is more to it than that. Developing familiarity with a foreign language provides a profound boost to student esteem. It awakens pride in oneself and awareness of the big world out there.
As Hampshire Regional Superintendent Craig Jurgensen notes, the simple act of learning another language also stimulates the brain. “It’s just a good intellectual activity,” he told Crosby. All those benefits can help check off important goals on the high school list. Language acquisition is not only good for students, notes Jackson, the Amherst-Pelham principal, it is good for the world. “If we can communicate better and understand each other better, that is a positive addition to the planet.”