WASHINGTON: Ever since the September 11 attacks exposed a lack of expert Arabic speakers in the US government, with key intelligence documents collecting dust for lack of translators, there has been a hue and cry for the US school system to pump out more linguists.
And schools from coast to coast have responded. Colleges and universities are starting courses to meet unprecedented student interest. Middlebury College’s famed summer language institute just added space for 30 per cent more students in Arabic, and two Maryland high schools are offering Arabic courses.
But experts in the language say that anybody who believes that schools in the US will be able to fill the gap quickly are deluding themselves. They argue that there are relatively few people in the pipeline and that Arabic is among the most difficult languages to learn. Also, the college environment isn’t ideal for learning it.
“The best way to learn a language is without distraction, which makes most university language programmes problematic, because students are probably taking biology, psychology and basket-weaving along with it,” said Roger M. Allen, a leading Arabic scholar who is a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. “It becomes just another subject, which is exactly what it is not,” he said.
Learning other languages has never been a high priority among Americans. The US was built by immigrants who, until recently, tried to shed their old languages and accents to melt into their new world, said Kirk Belnap, an Arabic professor at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.
World War-I left the Americans suspicious of anything foreign, and the Supreme Court in the early 1920s overturned laws in 22 states that restricted the teaching of foreign languages. In 1979, a report commissioned by President Jimmy Carter declared that Americans’ “incompetence in foreign languages is nothing short of scandalous,” and many linguists say that not much has improved since.
Fewer than one in 10 students at American colleges major in foreign languages, according to the National Council of Organizations of Less Commonly Taught Languages. And most of those language majors choose French, German, Italian or Spanish. Only nine per cent learn such languages as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Indonesian, ones that are spoken by the majority of the planet’s people.
Foreign languages are not considered a core subject in the US, unlike in Europe, where people cross borders more frequently. Europeans also start students on languages at an early age and get more practice than Americans.
Lexie Doyle understands about a lack of practice. She took three years of Spanish in her Fairfax, Virginia, high school did well. But when she went to college, she realized that she didn’t remember much, so she started right back “at zero.” After three more semesters and top grades, she was unable “to speak a lick” of Spanish, she said.
Why didn’t it stick? Classes were packed and “you answer every 10th question because there are so many other kids.” She would do homework alone, with few people to help her practice speaking.
The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages recommends that an elementary school programme include classes three to five days a week for 30 to 40 minutes and that middle schools hold classes daily for 40 to 50 minutes. Few public schools do this, even in the most commonly taught languages; Spanish and French.
Practice is the key, and immersion — living in a country where the language is spoken or being in a situation where only that language is spoken — is the
best way of learning, said Dirgham Sbait, a professor at Portland State University in Oregon.—Dawn/ The Washington Post News Service.
