Consult anyone who took three or four years of a language in high school and chances are they can barely remember how to count to 10. For most, learning a second language consists of being herded into a classroom and made to memorize conjugation charts and two-minute oral presentations—don’t forget the accent marks. That has become, after all, the de facto goal of language education—get in, get out and get it over with.
The fact is that before college, language teachers generally expect too little of students. Acquisition of a second language in the classroom has become so systematized that it has lost all semblance of real-world language development. In many cases, students are not even expected to speak—just fill-in-the-blank. Vocabulary is memorized instead of internalized, and conjugations are abstracted so absurdly that students know just enough to reproduce them for a test but not during a conversation. Students fail to recognize patterns between one language and the next; that syntax can be symphonic and a joy to recreate.
But why do we fail to take this seriously? In a nation so expansive and geographically isolated, it is hard for most of us to imagine needing to communicate in another tongue. And even when we do manage to travel outside our borders, we are met with more English. Yes, it is convenient that English has become the international language of business and travel; i.e. the Italian woman asking the French man for directions to the Parisian train station in English. But that does not mean speakers of English have nothing practical to gain by such study.
As a student of a second and third language, I can attest that studying French and Spanish has improved my English and providing me better understanding of grammatical structure and a wider vocabulary. Like studying calculus or philosophy, acquiring a second tongue established an entirely new architecture for the logical side of my brain. I learned to process data in new ways. I learned to read for meaning and content and to think critically. Combine that with newfound cultural understanding and a broadened world view and it seems that we would all be wise to pick up a new language.
Sadly, Americans have poor second language skills because learning a second language is not culturally valued. We were not born bad at remembering a language; we were placed in a system that did not expect us to be capable of it. Because if the pimply teenager at the movie ticket counter in Prague can sell you a ticket in English or the seven-year-old child in Fez can convince you to tour a tannery in Arabic, French, English, Spanish and German, it is clear that there are functional ways to teach everyone to be functionally competent in a second language.
The key is using what we learn rather than digesting it and vomiting it back up come the day of the test. We must wake up and speak. Teachers must stop coddling students, and students must demand more of themselves. If America is to a cultural influence—if we are to regain the respect of our international peers—we must prove that we too bother to speak somebody else’s language.
Rebecca Quinn is a senior art history, Spanish and French triple major. She can be reached for comment at [email protected].
