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WASHINGTON
COMMENTARY
Language Learning and
National Security
BY ANNE C. LEWIS
HE FRONT page of a newspaper or
the TV news must seem like a foreign language to a huge percentage of
K-12 students. Recent surveys of
high school youths by National Geographic-Roper found in 2002 that
only 17% could locate Afghanistan
on a map; less than one-third could
find Great Britain. Perhaps even more disturbing, in the
most recent (2006) survey, just 37% could locate Iraq,
though U.S. troops had been there since 2003.
While the rest of the world expects its students to be
bilingual, or even trilingual, less than 40% of our youths
consider themselves proficient in another language, despite the influx of immigrant students. It should not
be surprising, then, that our young people are ignorant
about the rest of the world. One of the primary benefits of studying another language is the knowledge one
acquires of geography and different cultures.
A very revealing item in the Iraqi Study Commission report was the finding that of the 1,000 employees
in the U.S. embassy in that country, only six were fluent in Arabic. Moreover, as our military moved from
fighting a war to trying to win friends, it found itself
terribly unprepared and inept in communicating with
the people.
Until this century, the United States could thrive
despite being isolated by geography and language. Today, knowing only one language and its culture is a
national disgrace. And soon it will prove disastrous for
our citizens, for the military, and for business interests.
Like so many challenges to our education system,
policy makers are aware of the problems and are creating various answers. As with the shock of the Soviet
Union’s Sputnik 1 in 1957, the federal response is to
frame the issue as one of security. Fifty years ago the
National Defense Education Act (NDEA) focused on
T
■ ANNE C. LEWIS writes on national issues in education policy
from the Washington, D.C., area and other locales (e-mail: anneclewis
@earthlink.net).
84
PHI DELTA KAPPAN
developing greater foreign language capacities in this
country because of national security. Remnants of these
efforts in the Higher Education Act have broadened the
purposes to area studies and more general language
studies. But the K-12 sector has remained largely unaffected, at least by federal action.
In marches the military, again. The Department of
Defense has launched the National Security Education
Program to provide a language pipeline beginning at
the K-12 level, awarding its first grant to the University
of Oregon and the Portland Public Schools for a program in Chinese. Now, four federal agencies are cooperating under the National Security Language Initiative, and the U.S. Department of Education’s Foreign
Language Assistance Program has awarded $22 million
to expand language instruction in Chinese, Arabic,
Hindi, Korean, and Russian.
Dependent on shifting world events, interest in foreign languages in our schools and colleges grows only
in spurts — from Japanese, to Chinese, to Arabic. Meanwhile, real bilingualism never takes hold. In fact, K-12
policies today show an almost xenophobic attitude toward different languages — as opposed to taking advantage of the language background of immigrants and
building on that capacity to create a future expertise that
the military and business leaders say is essential.
Policy makers say the right things. Even the No
Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act includes foreign languages as part of a core curriculum. But tell me one district or school that has increased its offerings of foreign
languages because of NCLB. If anything, resources and
time have been diverted from subjects other than math
and reading. Also, the Committee for Economic Development, representing business and higher education
interests, has said that knowing foreign languages is a
“basic” for American leadership in the future. President Bush launched a foreign language initiative, but
most of the action at the federal level has merely moved
resources around. It is a patchwork put together for
emergencies.
In testimony before Congress this year, the president of the American Council of Teachers of Foreign
Languages (ACTFL), Rita Oleksak, called for a coordinated, consistent foreign language experience in every
child’s education, from kindergarten to graduate school.
This is the only way, she said, “that we will close the
language gap that prevents the United States from full
participation in global interactions.” The best intentions of the military, the Department of State, and business to produce language-qualified personnel will fail
unless foreign languages become part of the infrastructure of education, starting in the early grades.
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A new report from the National Research Council
(International Education and Foreign Languages: Keys to
Securing America’s Future, 2007) makes the same point.
Charged with evaluating the international education
programs in the Higher Education Act (most left over
from the NDEA), it notes that the federal emphasis on
foreign languages traditionally foresaw a need for a relatively small number of language and culture experts
in academe and government. Today, that expertise is essential in business, health, education, law enforcement,
the courts, and social services.
The NRC report focuses on higher education, but it
says intensive attention to foreign languages should begin no later than the middle grades. It is ironic that current education policies require English-language learners to be proficient in English almost immediately, but
the NRC committee’s research team comes to a “virtually unanimous finding” that attaining functional proficiency in a second language requires a lot of time.
Using the federal scale of proficiency (level 3), the Foreign Service Institute estimates students need about 24
weeks of full-time daily instruction, plus 3-4 hours of
homework each day, to become functional in a language
similar to English, such as one of the Romance languages.
The erratic foreign language experience of American K-12 students is far from good enough to prepare
them for the future. We need more and better-trained
teachers, good curricula, and better uses of technology to deliver rich language experiences. Moreover, we
need the flexibility to use native-heritage speakers as
resources in any number of creative ways.
A massive campaign to help our students become
foreign language literate seems impossible in the current limited vision of NCLB. However, if the military
can cite security, educators can cite research on the academic benefits of second-language learning (check the
ACTFL website). Knowing a second language correlates with higher academic achievement, improved memory skills, increased student ability to hypothesize in science, and better problem solving. It would also make future generations a lot more competent to deal with the
K
world, as they most surely will have to do.
OCTOBER 2007
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File Name and Bibliographic Information
k0710lew.pdf
Anne C. Lewis, WASHINGTON COMMENTARY: Language Learning
and National Security, Vol. 89, No. 02, October 2007, pp. 84-85.
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