In his blog on the Washington Post website, Jay Mathews pointedly asks why high school students in the United States spend so much time learning foreign languages when they rarely seem to gain fluency. From his (and my) anecdotal experience, it is often easy to get an A in a high school language class without ever becoming proficient in that language. As a result, students often spend several years in high school learning a foreign language with little to show for it by the end of their language educations.
Mathews questions our true motives and commitment to learning these languages. First, he says that in the Washington DC school system, where language learning is no longer required, he finds that most top students are still enrolled in language classes. However, he believes that this is primarily due to most colleges requiring foreign language classes, a requirement that effectively maintains the language-learning mandate. Second, he claims that in a more general sense, for all of the rhetoric about the value of language learning, the United States imports knowledge and essentially requires others to learn English. To put it more neutrally, there is a large enough body of English-language culture, business, and intellectual discourse that English-speakers rarely feel a pressing need to learn a new language.
The MLA published a report in 2006 about the state of foreign language learning in the United States. The amount of people learning languages in US Universities is at one of the highest levels it has been in 40 years, but it is not growing very quickly. The most interesting part of this report was the breakdown of how many people are learning individual languages and the ratio of advanced learners to beginning learners (testing how many people reach higher level classes). Spanish came out as the clear winner in these statistics, showing the highest number of learners and a low ratio between advanced and beginning learners meaning people often reach high level Spanish.
In general, the MLA report does not support or refute Mathews' argument since it only shows how many people are learning languages, not their motives or ultimate fluency. However, the popularity of Spanish also suggests that Mathews is right in claiming that Americans will not learn languages until they feel they need to. It is probably not coincidental that as Spanish-language learning has increased as a percentage of all language learning, the number of Spanish-speakers in the United States has continually increased. Spanish is both the second most spoken language in the United States and the most learned second language.
Being a native speaker is the only reason I walked out of my high school AP Spanish class with a 5 on my AP test. I know that not a single other person in the class took the AP test because after 6 years of Spanish class, no one else felt proficient enough in the language. I also know that if Spanish hadn't been such an easy grade, no one would have taken that class. Unfortunately, unless standards for foreign language education rise dramatically, I don't know if the problem will ever be solved.
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