Should Your Middle Schooler Be Studying a Foreign Language?

Last week, I posted about a FREE online Spanish curriculum available to middle school foreign language teachers.  But that raises the question--should your middle schooler be taking Spanish, or some other foreign language?

If your child is planning to go to college, then some years of a foreign language study are usually a requirement for most colleges beyond the community college level.  But should that study take place in middle schools?  Middle schools seem to fall into that gap between (a) the young elastic brain that is supposed to be able to pick up different languages naturally (usually maxing out somewhere between 6 and 8 years old) and (b) the high school transcript, where colleges look for evidence of foreign language study.

There is another issue about learning languages in middle schools, at least if your child is attending public school.  From the latest figures I could find (from a not-very-extensive data search), the primary languages taught in American schools continue to be Spanish and French.  Many students, parents, and educators, however, press for other languages in the forefront of international relations, such as Chinese (generally Mandarin), Arabic, Japanese, or Russian.  If you and/or your students are interested in such languages, in most cases they may have to wait until high school for any hope of such languages being offered in school.

On the other hand, foreign language educators argue that language mastery is a function of longevity (which, frankly, I think is the case for almost any subject, but I can particularly see the need for that in terms of speaking a language).

Here is an interesting article I found in the Washington Post about this issue:
The Foreign Language Dilemma:  Si or Oui?

And here, not related particularly to middle schools but to the topic in general, is NC State's reasons why it is still valuable to take French.

What is the decision in your house?  Are your middle schoolers taking language classes?  Add your opinions or experiences in the comments below.

FREE Online Spanish Curriculum for Middle School Teachers

Language Treks has a special gift for budget-crunched middle school teachers.  They are offering any public or private school 6th, 7th, 8th, or 9th grade Spanish teacher a FREE school edition of their online Spanish curriculum, Discover Spanish (which normally costs $229.95/year).  The curriculum consists of 36  interactive lessons, each with a cartoon-based everyday scenario that are spoken and written out in Spanish and/or English.  Students can practice their pronunciation of the words and phrases for that lesson, then test their recall with a game.

You can check out the program with a sample lesson here, or request your free subscription here.  If you aren't eligible for the free program, you can buy an individual 12-month subscription for only $54.95 here.

Is Studying a Foreign Language Still Important?

Every year, we are advised about all the additional stuff we need to be teaching our middle schoolers and high schoolers.  We are told they need more science and math, more computers and technology, more business and finance work, more arts and music, more writing, more more more.  But how can we fit it all in?  If we are adding in additional years in traditional subjects, or including new subjects like information technology, what do we let fall by the wayside in a school day that only has so many hours?

One area I haven't heard as much about lately is foreign languages.  On one hand, with all the emphasis on the globalization of our modern world, it seems it would be important to communicate to at least some section of the planet that doesn't speak English.  On the other hand, are we just assuming that everyone else will continue to learn English, so there is no need for us to learn one of their languages?

However, at least on the college level, it seems that foreign language instruction has been growing steadily for at least the last decade.  The Modern Language Association has just released the results of its 2009 comprehensive survey of enrollments in languages other than English among 2,514 US undergraduate and graduate institutions.  It shows that foreign language enrollments in 2009 were at an all-time high of 1,682,627 students, having grown by 6.6% between 2006-2009 and by nearly 13% from 2002-2006.

The most popular language by far (it enrolls more students than all other foreign languages combined) is Spanish, which has long held the #1 position in foreign language studies with 864,986 students.  The second most popular language is French, with 216,419 students, and followed by German with 96,349 enrolled.  These languages, along with what has traditionally been the fourth-ranked language, Italian, continue to grow, but by relatively small percentages (from 2-5%).

The great leaps in enrollments, however, have come from what the MLA calls "less commonly taught languages" or LCTLs, which grew by 31.2% from 2002-2006, then by an additional 20.8% from 2005-2009.  The biggest percentage gains were registered among the Arabic languages, where enrollments raised by 126.5% from 2002-2006, then by another 46.3% in 2006-2009.  Any guesses about what the most popular LCTL is?  Actually, it is American Sign Language (ASL), which was up by 16.4% to a total of 91,763 students and supplanting Italian as the fourth most popular language.  Japanese, with 73,434 enrollments, was the most popular Asian language and was the 6th most popular language overall, followed by Chinese in 7th place with 60,976 students.  The top ten list was rounded out with Arabic in 8th place (35,083 students), Latin in 9th (32,606), and Russian in 10th (26,883).  The only languages among the top 15 that reported losing students were Ancient Greek (although some of that was explained by some schools that have reclassified their Greek classes) and Hebrew, both Modern and Biblical.

The good news, according to experts, is that language studies seem to be more stable now then they were in the 1980s and 1990s.  So if your children are interested in pursuing a LCTL, there's a good chance they can find a college that will enable them to continue their studies at the postsecondary level.  Overall, US colleges and universities reported offering a total of 217 LCTLs, which is 35 more languages than were available in 2006.