<p>It’s fine if someone really wants to learn it in college, it should be there. I don’t like language requirements though. There are usually not that many choices and too much emphasis on grammar vs. conversation.</p>
<p>Re: studying culture and literature in college languages - it depends on the level and the college. Community colleges typically bring it up during the 5th level class. Most colleges during the 4th semester class. Top colleges during the 3rd semester class.
In order to <em>place</em> into Spanish 3 at UCB, for example, you need to have taken AP Spanish. The course does involve reading from a novel. Two semesters at Berkeley = 2 years in middle school + 4 years in HS (6 years). That gives you an idea of the pace at a top college. Even at a “regular” college, two high school years in one language will be considered equal to one semester at college. The entire elementary school sequence is covered in about 2 weeks in college.
Your daughter would be considered a heritage speaker and would not be taking Spanish 3, though, she’d be mandatorily placed in Spanish 21 or 22 and she would have to study historical and literary topics in order to pass. Spanish 25 (Literary analysis) is considered the FIRST course for students who want to be fluent, even for bilingual students, and passing it does not mean students are considered “fluent”.
Studying sociological and historical trends from the cultures is part and parcel of any college course, regardless of where it’s located, although lower tier colleges will include more grammar drills. The kind of analytical skills required can’t be reached by children.
So all the metalinguistic and analytical skills are out if you stop before high school. To top it off, learning as a child is fine but unless one is a heritage speaker (or one has motivated parents who can pay for immersion school), children don’t “learn faster”. It’s the same as for math: sure, children absorb like sponges, and if you drill your child in (say) math from an early age and they’re compliant or gifted, they’ll reach a pretty good level earlier than others, but it’s not a reason for stopping studying math when they’re 13… and similarly it’s kind of a waste to see someone who’s gifted stop at what they’re good at when they should be improving. It certainly isn’t a reason why <em>everyone else</em> should stop before high school when they haven’t received that intensive education. Someone who started before age 10 may have a better accent, granted. Nevertheless, people don’t learn faster from 4 hours/week in primary school than from 4hours/week in college. Your child had hours of exposition to the language children whose only exposition would be at school, simply wouldn’t have - so you can’t compare. Is your question really “why do bilingual children or heritage speakers have to take a foreign language in high school or college”? Or “Shouldn’t we all place our children in immersion schools?”
All in all, though, good for your daughter. I hope she keeps reading age-appropriate books so that her Spanish skills do not lag behind her English skills (a common problem among bilingual kids), that she gets to take AP Spanish her first year in high school then more advanced classes in Spanish through Dual Enrollment. This would certainly be good for her since she sounds good at it and would look better to colleges than no language credit.</p>
<p>Rand, you are wrong about children’s abilities. I learned French at 23 and did graduate work in France. While fluent, my ear - indeed the motility of neurons in the brain - meant that there were certain sounds I could never hear, so I have an accent. </p>
<p>My kids learned while under 5 (they were fluent in 6 months) and their French is indistinguishable from natives. At that age, when the brain is getting wired, it changes abilities in ways an older person never could do.</p>
<p>There’s a difference between knowing a language and having an accent. Children don’t have an accent but they can’t function at an adult’s level for critical thinking and just general understanding.So stopping teaching them languages while they are children wouldn’t bring them up to a level similar to a high school or college student’s (what was being argued at the beginning of the thread.)
Also, your children are in the same situation as Californiaaa’s: in an immersion setting. Just taking a couple hours of French a week while living in the US would not have had the same effect upon your children. The point argued in OP’s first post is that languages should be taught in primary school AND NOT further on. You’re right that children don’t have an accent, but the point wasn’t whether a child raised in France has a better accent than an adult…</p>
<p>Myo, we were discussing the ability to learn languages as dependent on age. The accent is not “knowing”, but it is an indicator of ability to learn, a language. That is neuroscience. It is much harder to master a language when you start after 5 years of age, though some people retain the ability will into their teens. The question is when it is best to learn them, to which I answer: earlier than college, but it is still worth it IMHO, if one is interested.</p>
<p>I know that’s what was being discussed (^^) but it wasn’t the topic of this thread.
The topic of this thread is why waste time and money learning languages in high school when you could learn in elementary school INSTEAD (ie be done with it before high school).</p>
<p>I agree that it’s better to start in elementary school because you can have more years if you keep going from there, but that wasn’t the original post… the original post argued (i’m paraphrasing but you can look at it) that language instruction should shift from high school (or college) to elementary school, since it wouldn’t cost more to offer 4 years in elementary school than in high school, replacing language instruction in high school with more important/useful subjects.
I totally agree that children “pick up” accents in ways incomparable to adults and that they can learn a language faster than them when immersed in it. I also agree that immersion is the best way to learn and immersion as a child is pretty much ideal.
However, the situation presented to us is having a couple hours a week in elementary school instead of in high school: such a situation may guarantee a great accent (if the adult teaching has a great accent) but it can’t replace learning the language in high school or in college.
I also agree it’s best to start as a child… as long as the child continues with it (and not, as is argued by the original poster in several posts, if the child stops taking classes when reaching high school.)
A child who learns a language from age 5 to 11, then stops, won’t know a whole lot, and probably less than a college freshman taking 1 semester of French, even though the college freshman will have an atrocious accent.
I doubt the child will retain much actually :s if foreign language instruction stops when they leave elementary school, unless they can use it (which is unpractical in most parts of the country and for many foreign languages, not to mention insufficient. At least I wouldn’t expect my 13 year old to keep his French language skills up on his own…)
Overall we’re in agreement, but we’re not discussing the original post or the original questions 
In case it wasn’t clear earlier 
I very much disagree with the notion that foreign languages are best learned in elementary school at the expense of continuing/learning them in high school or college. In fact, I think that if the choice is 5 years in elementary school OR 5 years in secondary school, I’d pick 5 years in secondary school!
(In many places, I realize, it’s not a real choice - the real choice is 2-3 years in high school or nothing.)</p>
<p>Our hs offers only spanish and french…we spend a lot on sports and not enough in education… In fact, I wanted to learn italian and latin, just for fun, yet I can’t because there is limited material on line and for books you can’t hear the pronunciation.</p>