By Ellie Ashford
01/18/05 -- Among the unintended consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act is the pressure it’s putting on school districts to cut back on foreign languages in an effort to put more resources and teaching time into math and language arts.
The provision in NCLB that requires all teachers to be “highly qualified” by the end of the 2005-06 school year also is having a negative effect in some schools that teach less-common languages.
The de-emphasis on foreign languages is “certainly a big issue in the foreign language community,” says Donna Christian, president of the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, D.C. She says NCLB “has a suppressing effect on the choices school boards fund.”
A 2004 study by the Council for Basic Education suggests NCLB has forced a narrow focus on reading, math, and science at the expense of foreign languages and other subjects not tested under NCLB.
A soon-to-be-published study by the National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center, based at Iowa State University, found 22 percent of school districts have eliminated one or more foreign language courses.
Among the reasons cited by the districts are insufficient funding, lack of administration support, and the emphasis on state testing, says Marcia Rosenbusch, director of the center. In addition, 24 percent of respondents say they are cutting teacher positions.
According to a report by the American Council on Education, overall foreign language enrollments in American colleges and universities fell from 16 percent of total enrollment in 1960 to just 8 percent in 2002.
Few U.S. graduate students are studying languages deemed by the federal government to be critical to national security, the U.S. General Accounting Office reported in 2002.
It also noted that before Sept. 11, 2001, no U.S. college or university had a regular course in Pashto, the language of the Taliban. The final report by the 9/11 Commission found the nation’s ability to fight terrorism is hampered by the lack of linguists able to translate documents in Arabic.
To raise public understanding about the importance of learning foreign languages, the American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) has designated 2005 “the year of languages.”
ACTFL hopes the yearlong celebration will promote multilingualism and cultural understanding, motivate people to learn languages, and promote the development of a national policy on foreign language education.
The latest official enrollment survey conducted by ACTFL reports that just one-third of students in grades 7-12 were taking a foreign language in 2000, says Marty Abbott, director of education at ACTFL. Only about 5 percent of elementary school students are taking a foreign language.
The survey also found that Spanish is definitely showing the most growth, and there is growing interest in Japanese and Chinese, while a declining number of students are taking French, German, and Latin.
Interest in Arabic
Arabic is the seventh most popular language in the world, with 221 million native speakers, yet few U.S. public schools offer instruction in it.
The Dearborn, Mich., school system is an exception. The community has been home to a large number of immigrants from the Middle East since Henry Ford began hiring people from Lebanon to work in his auto factories in the 1920s, says Kathleen McBroom, teacher leader for world languages for the Dearborn school district.
Arabic is the district’s most popular language, and three of Dearborn’s seven middle schools and two of its three high schools offer instruction in Arabic, McBroom says.
McBroom says NCLB, as well as severe budget cuts in Michigan, are putting pressure on school districts across the state to de-emphasize language studies, especially since foreign languages are not considered a core academic subject and are not a requirement for a high school diploma in the state.
In Dearborn, “we’re always under the gun, but so far we’ve been able to save them,” McBroom says. “We have the support of the school board, and 80 percent of parents want foreign languages taught in middle and high schools. . . . But we haven’t been able to grow and expand as we hoped we would.”
Fairfax County, Va., also offers Arabic -- at three of its 25 high schools -- along with nine other languages, including Japanese, Russian, Korean, Chinese, and American Sign Language, as well as the more common offerings. Italian will be added next year.
Paula Patrick, the district’s foreign language coordinator, says all students should have an opportunity to learn a language, but a high school can’t offer a class unless at least 30 students enroll. The district is looking at other ways to offer more language classes, such as online courses.
Elementary schools
The district offers “partial immersion programs” at 13 elementary schools, where students spend half the day learning regular grade-level content, such as math and science, in a foreign language. Most of them focus on Spanish, but there are three Japanese, one French, and one German immersion schools.
Other Fairfax County elementary schools bring in a foreign language teacher once or twice a week to supplement the core curriculum.
ACTFL recommends that elementary school language programs 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.
Abbott says it’s important to start learning a foreign language early because the skills learned in language studies are transferred to other subjects. Also, students learn a great deal of content -- history, culture, geography, even science -- while learning a language.
Highly qualified teachers
NCLB is placing a double bind on foreign language teachers. Students don’t have to be tested in languages under NCLB, but because they’re considered core subjects, teachers have to be certified.
“That’s a concern, especially in middle school,” Abbott says. A teacher might be certified, but also could be teaching a single class in Chinese and is not certified to be a Chinese teacher. As a result, the teacher would have to attain certification in that subject, or the school has to drop the course.
That’s a problem for the Dearborn school district because Michigan doesn’t offer certification for Arabic teachers, McBroom says. All teachers of Arabic in Dearborn are certified; they are either native speakers with a master’s degree in bilingual education or have degrees in other languages.
McBroom is working with a committee formed by the National Capitol Language Resource Center in Washington, D.C., to develop standards for Arabic instruction, which she hopes will eventually lead to the development of standards for highly qualified teachers.
Less-common languages
The certification issue also is a “critical problem” for Filipino teachers in California, says Arturo Pacho, director of the Filipino American Educators Association.
Officials at the Sweetwater Union High School District, which offers several Filipino courses, are concerned about how they will meet the highly qualified teacher provisions in NCLB because many of the teachers of these courses are not credentialed to teach Filipino, and there is no way they can get credentialed, says spokesperson Lillian Leopold.
“You can’t major in Filipino, and California does not offer an exam to earn a credential to teach Filipino,” she says. As a result, the district might have to stop offering Filipino, and the teachers might lose their jobs.
Lemonia Poumakis, the director and co-founder of the Athenian Academy, a Greek immersion charter school in Dunedin, Fla., is hoping the Florida education department will soon approve the credentials of its Greek teachers. The Greek government paid to send two teachers from Greece to teach at the school, and they need to be credentialed.
The school has 86 students in grades K-5. Students spend half the school day learning the Greek language and learning math and science in Greek.
Although originally planned for students from Greek-American families, many others have chosen the school because so much of the English language derives from Greek, and a knowledge of Greek is good preparation for college and professional careers.
The benefits of language
In Texas, state lawmakers recently strengthened the high school graduation requirements, mandating two years of a foreign language for all students. Before, a language was optional.
One of the district’s challenges is providing advanced courses to meet the needs of students who are native speakers of Spanish and want to strengthen their skills, says Carrie Harrington, the school district’s program director of foreign languages. The district also provide classes for students who grew up speaking Spanish but don’t have strong reading and writing skills.
As expected, Spanish is the most popular second language in Fort Worth, but students also are “flocking to Latin,” Harrington says. Latin has long been popular among students planning careers in law or medicine, and many students now choose Latin because they hope it will help them do better on the SAT.
While it’s usually suggested that the main reasons to learn another language have to do with global commerce, national security, and diplomacy, there also are community and personal reasons.
In immigrant communities there are “generational communications issues,” Christian says. Children often are more adept in English than their parents and, when they lose their ability to speak their native language, they can have trouble talking to their parents or grandparents. But talking about the need to learn languages to promote the national interest “sells better.”
“Expecting the rest of the world to learn English is not the way to understand other people,” Abbott says. “The way you understand other people is by learning their language and culture.”