Foreign Language in High School
Foreign Language in High School Does freedom of speech include the choice of what language you learn in school? Many high schools are only offering Spanish as the sole foreign language. Gone are the days when students could choose what language to learn second to English. The schools have taken this choice away from our youth, due to the number of Spanish speaking people in this county. It is important for us to as a global society to offer multiple languages in high schools. If students are given a course of languages to take they will be successful in learning it. According to Nancy C. Rhodes and Ingrid Pufahl report “Foreign Language Teaching in U.S. Schools” released in 2009, Spanish instruction has remained stable at 93 percent. French instruction has declined from 64 to 46 percent at the high school level. During that same period the teaching of German has dropped from 24 to 14 percent. Latin instruction dropped from 20 to 13 percent. Russian went from 3 to 0.3 percent and Japanese from 7 to 3 percent. Chinese and Arabic are on an upswing, but are still hard to find. Chinese went from 1 to 4 percent and Arabic from zero to 0.6 percent. The other languages important to the future of a global society are either losing popularity in our schools, or making only tiny gains from very low levels. They are taught in 4 percent of high schools with foreign language programs. Individual school decides which foreign languages to teach, based on a variety of factors including demand from students and parents and the availability of qualified teachers. Some schools receive federal funding and teacher placement for teaching languages that the government deems critical for government jobs or national security. Recently, those languages have included Arabic, Chinese, Urdu, Farsi, Korean, and Japanese. So why are there so many schools only offering Spanish? According to Betsy Megas, there are plenty of good reasons for a student in the U.S. to learn Spanish. The
Cited: Megas, Betsy. Quora. 22 April 2012. 22 april 2012. . Pufahl, Nancy C. Rhodes and Ingrid. "Foreign Language Teaching in U.S. Schools." 2009. Shina, Hyon B. and Robert A Kominski. Language Use in the United States:. U.S. Census Bureau. American Community Survey Reports. Washington,DC: ACS-12, 2010. pdf. 22 April 2012.