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AT RANDOM ON LANGUAGE

Learning languages no longer a foreign concept
By Nathan Bierma
Special to the Tribune

January 12, 2005

For those who think Americans should be able to speak a language in addition to English to better communicate in a diverse world, there is good news and bad news.

The good news, to Thomas Keith Cothrun, president of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, is that enrollment in classes for most major foreign languages rose by double digit percentages from 1998 to 2003, according to the Modern Language Association.

"Americans are better realizing what language education brings to a society," Cothrun said. After Sept. 11, 2001, he said, "America began to realize how small the world has become."

The bad news, Cothrun said, is that we are still a very monolingual nation overall; too many Americans assume that English is all we and the world should use to communicate.

And so Cothrun and the ACTFL have proclaimed 2005 to be the Year of Languages, to raise awareness of the need to learn other languages.

Each month has a different theme. This month's is language policy in government and business; April's theme is language learning in higher education; July's is adult language learning; September's is heritage language learning. (For a complete list of events, go to www.yearoflanguages.org.)

The ACTFL is providing resources to schools and local organizations for festivals throughout the year that teach and celebrate foreign languages.

On Monday, ACTFL officially kicked off the Year of Languages with a summit on language policy involving academic, business and government leaders. Many participated via teleconference. On the agenda was how to promote language learning by instituting curriculum requirements in schools and developing incentives for companies and workers to learn languages.

"If you survey people, everybody would say, `Yes, language education is very important,'" Cothrun said. "But if you look at the funding for language education, society is saying, `No, it's not very important.' Quality programming has to be started in areas where it doesn't exist."

"We need to put foreign language more in the forefront of what is taught in the schools," said Bret Lovejoy, executive director of ACTFL. "In the Education Department, there's an international education section, but foreign language is a very small part of that."

Despite these efforts to advance the cause of multilingualism in America, Lovejoy said the ACTFL doesn't intend to challenge English's status as the primary language of North America.

"It has nothing to do with trying to undermine English," Lovejoy said. "What the Year of Languages is about is for us as a nation to relate to an international populace. It's imperative that we understand other languages and cultures, and not shut the door and go back to the days of outlawing other languages as we did in the 1920s."

"Using other languages isn't anti-American; it's a core and defining characteristic of a good American citizen," said Cothrun.

It's also a characteristic of good business, Lovejoy added. "We have to do business with people who speak many other languages," he said. "It's important to understand the language and culture of our customers if we are going to compete internationally."

Cothrun, who teaches German in a southern New Mexico town where 60 percent of the population is Latino, agrees.

"I think that college students are seeing that an ability to communicate in another language is a marketable skill that puts them in an advantage whenever they're trying to find a job," he said.

"Many people don't understand that language education has really changed in the last 20 to 30 years," Cothrun said. "It used to be along the lines of rote memorization and translation. The true meaning was always figured out in English. Now it's really about communication."

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