Does taking 4 years of lforiegn anguage in HS really work?

Parent Cafe
61

<p>How exactly is fluency defined? I considered myself fluent in German after four years there. Then I got pregnant and realized that there was a whole vocabulary out there that anyone who had grown up as a child would know. I learned it quickly, but for most people even immersion won’t make you quite a native speaker. I also continued to have trouble with spoken jokes, especially since in Munich they often reverted to dialect for them. Interestingly I could follow the Bavarian jokes in the local paper. </p>

<p>I was amazed at how quickly my husband learned German. He had had all of one semester of community college German before we left. The first day he came back from the lab saying, they lied, no one speaks English except at journal club and I can’t even tell where the words start and end. Within a few weeks, he was fine. He’s got a much better ear than me though.</p>

62

<p>Foreign language in HS really depends on the teacher. I know very motivated friends who still have terrible language skills, because they had terrible teachers.</p>

<p>Personally, I started from scratch in French I, 9th grade, with an AMAZING teacher. She’s was the only French teacher for a long time, although I think this year there is a French I class taught by someone else who has a poor reputation from teaching Spanish and Latin. (I have no previous language experience unless you count very basic French in Canadian elementary school, which I lost anyway. I’m semi-bilingual in Mandarin, but that has helped me exactly zero with French.) I’m now in AP French (~11 students, but there were only 20+ in French 3) and Advanced French Lit independent study (6 students) as a senior. AP is mostly grammar, but we do read magazines (Paris Match) every week. In French Lit, we just finished discussing L’ETRANGER by Camus and will be starting RHINOCEROS this week. Reading is totally independent, since the class only meets once a week. It’s difficult and I keep a dictionary handy, but completely doable, and I love struggling through classic French literature. </p>

<p>I do plan on continuing French in college, studying abroad, with the goal of fluency. I chose French because a) I’m a Canadian citizen and proud of it, despite living abroad, and b) I can’t roll my r’s, so Spanish was out. The Latin teacher at my school is also excellent, though they don’t learn much in speaking (well, they aren’t supposed to).</p>

<p>But ultimately, I believe the main responsibility rests upon the teacher. The first day of French I was taught in French (and pantomime). I was having fun babbling in French, albeit simplistically, right from that first year. Whereas the AP Spanish students at my school still speak English in class about half the time. I am very far from fluent, but I would be comfortable in Quebec or France on vacation once I got over the embarrassment of my horrendous American accent / bad spoken grammar.</p>

<p>My beginning French class was not all role-playing, but it did involve a LOT of conversation. The teacher would just ask us things about life, school, etc. I thought that was a normal language class until I heard horror stories from friends in Spanish. (Btw, my amazing French teacher is not a native speaker, though of course she is fluent. She’s just an amazing TEACHER.)</p>

<p>starbright - Through various circumstances, I’ve missed out on two immersion opportunities in Canada; if we had stayed back in third grade, I’d probably have gone to an immersion high school and be fluent right now, and this past summer I turned down an immersion summer camp in favor of TASP.</p>

<p>On the other hand, my experience with learning Mandarin as a heritage language has been pretty dismal. The teachers were native speakers but not otherwise credentialed for teaching; since they were mostly teaching native speakers, we just read a chapter a week and did vocab/grammar exercises. Rinse and repeat for the three years that I skimmed by on the minimum amount of work and cramming for exams.</p>

<p>I like JHS’s concept of “competence” instead of “fluency,” but would add that being able to read a newspaper or a short work of classic literature in French or Spanish after three years of HS instruction is VERY different from the same instruction in Chinese. Some languages are just harder and more time-consuming to learn.</p>

<p>My parents immigrated from China as adults; they had both studied English in school, but didn’t become competent until after years of immersion. They still read English slowly and do not read English novels for leisure (though both read Chinese novels online). But I know other adult immigrants who have learned English to near fluency.</p>

63

<p>Student chiming in here. I feel like this depends so much on the school’s foreign language program. My high school (~75% graduation rate) has an intense foreign language program; almost all of my friends ended up as a double major or a minor in a language. I took 4 years of German in HS and 2 years in middle school, and I tested into 300-level classes in college. However, we could only get out of the intro sequence, and I could have easily jumped into the senior capstone as a freshman. (We read Brecht as sophomores and Die Verwandlung as juniors in high school!) I would also like to point out that there is a significant difference between fluency and high proficiency. I would not consider myself to have near-native fluency in German because I still have to talk around abstract concepts and struggle to speak colloquially. I am highly proficient and have passed the German equivalent of the TOEFL, but even if you ignored my accent, I could not pass for a native speaker because I speak almost entirely in an academic register.</p>

<p>I would also argue that having a poor teacher in high school is almost worse than not taking a language at all. I just started French, and some of the other students in my class took 4 years in high school. However, almost all of them are struggling a lot more than I am because they picked up so many bad habits or just didn’t learn grammar in HS.</p>

64

<p>MiamiDAP is right that reception is generally a lot easier than speaking (or writing). And aussiek517 is surely right that true fluency is a very high standard. And Keilexandra is right that standards should perhaps vary based on the language, and it may not be reasonable to expect high school students to be able to read a newspaper in Chinese.</p>

<p>I don’t think the goal for high school language classes is to train spies who could pass for natives under interrogation.</p>

<p>There are lots of different possible goals for high school language classes. I would like them just to accomplish SOMETHING meaningful. The experience of my kids and their friends, outside of Latin, is that they don’t accomplish much that is meaningful.</p>

<p>The high school Spanish class I took in 9th grade, where all the other students were in 11th or 12th grade, was not an AP class (it was one level below that). We read four or five whole, real books during the year – Unamuno’s Abel Sanchez, Pio Baroja’s El arbol de la ciencia, Ana Matute’s Los soldados lloran de noche, a play by Buero Vallejo, and at least one other book whose author I don’t remember, called La baraja. </p>

<p>It didn’t make me fluent by a long shot, but it put me in a position so that when I WAS immersed in a Spanish-language environment, I could make progress very quickly. Kids in my program who had only had a year or two of regular high school Spanish did not learn anywhere near as much, even spending nine months living with Spanish families. The gap between people who had taken some kind of advanced Spanish and those who hadn’t widened, not narrowed, over the course of a school year.</p>

65

<p>“How exactly is fluency defined?” - people of native language can understand you no matter what subject is. However, IMO indoes not mean that one would speak comletely without any accent, which is not possible to get rid of unless one learn language before 16 years of age (average, approximation). I was always fascinated with Kissinger’s accent (he is of course speaks English fluently). I heard that he has learned English at 10 Usually people who learned at 10 in environment of native speakers do not have accent even though their older family members do.</p>

66

<p>In my experience, the ability to pick up a foreign language depends on the individual’s aptitude as much as on the teacher and that aptitude varies in terms of listening, reading, writing, and speaking, just as it does in English. I took a year long Arabic language immersion course right after high school. All of the students had been pre-tested for some ability to learn a foreign language (using some fake language the military invented for this purpose), we all started at exactly the same level (no prior exposure to the language), had exactly the same instruction (8 hours/day plus a roommate in the same class), and presumably similar levels of motivation (needed for our job). The learning outcome and learning styles, however, varied widely among the eight students in the class. I am one of those people who has no ear. I need to learn by reading more than listening. As for speaking, that is just never going to be pretty. I’ve been told my attempts to speak French are downright painful to the listener, similar I’m sure to my nonexistent singing ability. Of course the military didn’t care if I could speak for that particular job or I never would have passed their little pre-test. I’m sure the air traffic controllers underwent an entirely different screening process.</p>

67

<p>And, I remember Henry K. saying that everything he heard he heard as German, then had to translate in his head. I guess that means other languages didn’t exactly come easily to him, but he seemed to do ok though!</p>

68

<p>I haven’t read all the posts here but it seems to me that a lot of you put too much emphasis on reading. Reading Le petit Prince in 6th grade?? For heaven’s sake! This book is way over the head of a 6th grader. And of course all the cliches, Camus l’etranger, etc. One of my friend’s son who goes to the prestigious Thomas Jefferson Science and Technology school was “reading” Sarkozy’s speeches in 7th grade!! Needless to say he abandoned French the next year. Let’s not be so ambitious and stick to basics like everyday language and maybe kids will get something out of these years of HS language classes. Reading will fall in step once they acquire enough competence. By the way at the Foreign Service Institute, the language school of the State Department we give students scores on a scale of 0 to 5. A 5 is a highly educated native speaker who can speak like a politician (although frankly Sarkozy’s language is abhorrent sometimes).</p>

69

<p>

</p>

<p>Why such a “low” standard. :D</p>

70

<p>Lol! touche, bluebayou!</p>

71

<p>I couldn’t disagree with you more, guillaume. It’s spending years learning inane “everyday language” that kills language learning. (Well, inane “literature” like Le petit prince will do it, too.)</p>

<p>There has to be a payoff from learning a language. Knowing how to say “Jean and Marie go to the store to buy milk” isn’t it. The payoff doesn’t have to be Racine or Flaubert, it can be MC Solaar, or Agnes Varda, or Asterix, or Fernand Braudel. But something worth learning the language for.</p>

72

<p>Hey we read “Le Petit Nicolas” before we read “Le Petit Prince”. (It was a lot more fun too as I recall - a kid’s book about a naughty boy. My French teacher hated LPP so much she actually sent the whole class to another French teacher so she didn’t have to deal with the sappy last chapter. I didn’t mind Camus, though I liked Sartre better and I’d have been happy if we’d read more Moliere and more poetry. I think Asterix and TinTin would be good things to read early on. JHS you sound like a proponent of Whole Language (which personally I liked.)</p>

<p>Ha, they’ve just made Le Petit Nicolas into a film! See how your French is: <a href=“http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7x77g_le-petit-nicolas-teaser-hd-vf_shortfilms[/url]”>http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7x77g_le-petit-nicolas-teaser-hd-vf_shortfilms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

73

<p>

</p>

<p>I disagree. Rote learning, repetitive drills of everyday, spoken language can kill interest, but realizing that you can have conversations with native speakers because you do have those “everyday language” skills is very exciting. Not everyone, certainly not your everyday French person I would bet, reads Racine or Flaubert or sees an Agnes Varda film (I don’t even know who those other people are!). Not to say these are not worthy pursuits, but they aren’t for every foreign language, or even for most. </p>

<p>For me, as an “ear” learner, I can really only retain vocabulary if I hear it in conversation, used in context. I want to be able to read Japanese novels because I love to read and am really curious, but not because it would help me learn the language.</p>

74

<p>I also hated Le Petit Prince. Ugh. Why, oh why, is that considered such a classic? And would Winnie the Pooh be considered an American equivalent? What do they make students of English read in other countries?</p>

75

<p>

</p>

<p>Of the people I know who have become either competent or fluent in another language after the age of 16, all of them have a music background. A friend of mine from high school, now a professor of flute, is often taken for a native speaker of German, a language he started in college. (His French is good, too; he took that in high school.) Two other friends pick up languages like other adults pick up their morning coffee; both of them have a background in music, too. Of these three, one of them occasionally spoke Hungarian with his father, but his – my friend’s – ability in Hungarian far outstripped his father’s. It is possible to become competent/fluent in a language without speaking it at home. </p>

<p>Regarding Kissinger, he was an older teen (17, IIRC) when he came to the US; his younger brother speaks with English without an accent.</p>

<p>(When I was growing up, my mother was friends with a couple who both spoke English with an accent. The man was Greek, the woman Swiss, with Swiss-German as her native tongue. They conversed to each other in French, both of them having greater facility in that language than in English.)</p>

<p>As valuable as knowing a second language is, if you’re going to have only one language as an adult, English is an excellent one to have.</p>

76

<p>As she and I have noted many times before, mathmom and I had pretty similar educations. I remember Le petit Nicholas fondly, too, not least for having introduced me to that marvelous French word degueulasse.</p>

<p>I am not certain that there is a precise Anglo-American counterpart for Le petit prince, but if there is it’s not Winnie-the-Pooh. More like Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I can’t really object to reading Le petit prince – after all, it’s short, easy, and a bona fide cultural landmark. What I object to is ONLY reading Le petit prince, and spending months on it. The first thing my first French class read was Andre Gide’s Les caves du Vatican.</p>

77

<p>“something worth learning the language for.”</p>

<p>This is the crux of the matter. My adult ESL students want to be able to communicate with their neighbors, the supermarket clerk, the auto-repair shop guy, the landlord (by telephone), the boss, the customers, colleagues in other countries (by email or phone), colleagues in the US (in person, by email, and phone), and they want to resolve many different kinds of issues in each of these communicative events. My nephew the Classics major, wants to be able to find a more felicitous translation for a passage in Virgil, and then discuss his new interpretation of that text in fluent (and most likely written) English. My friend the professor of Medieval History, wants to be able to compose a lively discourse in Latin to use as the text accompanying her next Power Point presentation at a professional meeting where Latin is the only common language of a group of scholars.</p>

<p>In the language teaching business, one of the first things we learn is that our students have very different, and often very specific wants and needs. Many HS foreign language programs are offered just because, well you have to offer foreign language or your HS is hopelessly out of date. Most students take foreign language because it is a graduation requirement, not because they actually perceive a use for it in their lives. Not every foreign language department has a clear commitment to produce students who can actually communicate reasonably well in a real-life situation any more than the Math department down the hall has the clear commitment to produce students who can accurately figure out how to use the Math that they are taught in school in a real life situation, or than the English department has a clear commitment that the students can actually read and write the kinds of English that they will need to use in everyday (rather than college literature classes) life. Given that many foreign language instructors in HS and in college are there because of their love of the literature written in that language, there is a further tendency to focus language instruction on literary forms, and to relegate the development of communicative language skills to “conversation” classes. All to often, as JHU has written, those “conversation” classes and don’t follow a curriculum that continues to develop the students’ competence with realistic subject matter, or force them to use more complex grammatical forms.</p>

<p>All of this means that it is the exception, rather than the rule, that a HS student would be able to do much with four years of language instruction. Personally, I don’t think it is worth fretting about. Human beings are pre-programmed to learn language. We want to talk with each other. It really doesn’t matter all that much what we’re talking about, but we want to keep talking. That is why message boards like this are so addictive. We want the conversation. When we have a good reason to learn a second language, we can. With time and will and dedication we can master whatever aspects of that language we want to. We can even fix our accents if we have the wherewithal to work with the language-specific equivalent of a Hollywood accent coach.</p>

<p>Your kids have enough foreign language to graduate from HS. They have enough foreign language to qualify for admission at College X or University Y. Someday, when they really want to learn the language they can track down an environment that will help them learn the language skills that they actually need.</p>

78

<p>happymom, I agree with a lot of what you said, except when I was in high school no one who kept at languages for four years (that is to say, all of the decent students) graduated from high school with meaningless language ability. They could read, they could hold conversations, they were clued in to the culture. </p>

<p>Not everyone continued with their language in college. My best friend, with whom I took the last two years of high school French, didn’t. But on two separate occasions during his adulthood, he has spent 5+ months in French Polynesia, and he had no trouble dealing with life day-to-day in French.</p>

79

<p>

</p>

<p>…while other students correctly understand that it can add an extra layer of skills in their skill-set which can and has helped them secure jobs in a ridiculously competitive job market out of college. (“Because they actually perceive a use for it in their lives.”) </p>

<p>There are many upsides to the learning of language, not all of them being direct conversation.</p>

<p>Hmmm.
:)</p>

80

<p>I haven’t read every posts but I guess I can get back to OP.
It has been long since I took English in Japan. It was an “ English” not American spoken nor written language and it did not help at all speaking-reading wise when I came here 20 something years ago.
Japanese kids took mandatory English 6th to 12th grades starting from “This is a pen. That is a desk. Ben is a boy. Lucy is a girl” and didn’t get much far.
We did pronunciations with diagram of the tongue placement and all that but to no avail. Most Japanese reverse sound of “ L” and “R” can’t tell differences between “ th “ and “s”, “v” and “b” let alone whole grammar thing.
There was this genius brit guy in shogun era somehow self-taught samurai slang by the short time he was stationed in Japan. He had said in record, his secret was an extraordinary good ear and curiosity, plus sense of humor. How to define different sounds and connect that to certain object/ situation and mimic it.
When I did backward of what he have done, I kept that in my mind but I had bad ear and never able to pick up good speech skill.
I was listening Yoko Ono speak yesterday and all that caliber of her life, she still sounds awfully foreign, guess that is how hard it still is.</p>

<p>Reading wise, I started on Dr, Seuss with my kid and as he get older read everything he was assigned or recommended by his school. Bud, not Buddy, Hatchet, you get the idea. Sometime during middle school, we both had breakthrough.
Now I could not only read but “get” pretty much anything and I found it so much fun and easier to read in English than Japanese because I can be more objective to the writer’s style: it’s cheesiness/ immatureness become some sort of charm while if it is in Japanese, make my gut cringe. </p>

<p>Bottom line, if you like books, then learn to read, if you like people, learn to speak, if you need square job, learn to write. If you get to do all that, great, but not going to be able to achieve them all in same levels.</p>

<p>As for my kid, he did couple years of Spanish, some French and did not get anywhere but this year, found love in Mandarin Chinese, because letters are visually interesting and fun to copy. I don’t count on getting much out of it but if he wants to continue in the future, great.
I have not forced Japanese on him because of possible confusion and delay of developing language skill in young kids and well, here is the real reason.
Anyone wants to become “fluent” in Japanese?
There really is no way but being one and “good’ one that is, which I am not.</p>