11/6: Why language learning doesn't work in the US

In a community like CLS, saturated with students who actively seek out language learning and opportunities to engage with languages other than English, it's easy to forget that this community isn't reflective of most of the United States. Over 70% of Americans speak only English, a percentage that has increased dramatically over the past four decades. Why, in a world becoming globalized by the minute, is the US still so bad at language learning?

Of course, this statement by itself doesn't tell the whole story. Over 20% of the US population identify as bilingual, and this percentage may be even higher if we consider the individuals who may not consider themselves fluent in a second language, but have had repeated exposure to it throughout their lives. Still, comparing this to the over two-thirds of working-age adults in Europe who speak more than one language (including 20% who reported themselves as trilingual!), I'm still compelled to say it. The US population is bad at language learning. Or, put another way, language learning doesn't seem to work in America.

Why? After doing some research, as well as using my intuition based on growing up in America, I'd like to propose a couple causes.

1) A skew or bias in what languages are actually taught in American schools. In 2017, the Language Flagship at the Defense Language and National Security Education Office collaborated with several other organizations to release the National K-12 Foreign Language Enrollment Survey Report, which documented language learning in K-12 education throughout the US. Like most national surveys, the data are incomplete, but they still paint a telling picture of the state of US secondary language education.

Most people could probably guess that Spanish is the most common second language program, with 8,177 programs reported throughout the nation. French is the second-most common, followed by German. But the next most common offered language is Latin, a language without any native speakers. Latin has over 1500 programs throughout the nation; around 8 percent of schools surveyed offered it. Compare this to Hindi, the third most spoken language in the world, with only 19 programs reported, or Arabic, the fifth most spoken language, with only 161 programs reported, only one-tenth of the amount of Latin programs. Chinese is the second most-spoken language worldwide, but it still loses out in fifth place to Latin. Meanwhile, German, the twelfth most-spoken language in the world, wins the third spot.

Of course, there are political, cultural, and historical reasons for what languages are taught in US schools. But if we examine the data on what languages are most spoken in the US itself, the conclusions are similar; lesser spoken languages, with a cultural history of influencing the US and a colonial history worldwide, win out over objectively more widely spoken languages in the US. What would happen if the US taught those languages as well? What would happen to American cultural understanding of those languages and cultures?

I'll also add that because many American school programs are so limited in the languages they offer, this prevents heritage speakers of certain languages—even extremely common languages like Hindi or Arabic—from having an accessible way to become fluent, or learn to read and write, while they are still within the critical window of language learning. These students realistically often have to attend college to have access to resources to become fully bilingual in their heritage language, further eliminating a percentage of the population that could have become bilingual.

2) A lack of bilingual or native speaker instructors for languages. How we train and educate teachers has a natural impact on the quality and impact of language learning on students. And in the US, many teacher-training programs are designed for native English speakers, rather than bilingual or native speakers of the language being taught. So this point doesn't mean the US lacks bilingual speakers of other languages who could become teachers; it means that those individuals are underrepresented in the actual US language education landscape. Furthermore, public language education suffers from the same problems of all secondary education: lack of funding, barriers to certification, burnout (especially post-pandemic), high turnover, low pay, and political turmoil.  

And these barriers aren't limited to American citizens: To report from personal experience, when I went abroad to Beijing, China this summer, I met many Chinese students in the process of acquiring Master's Degrees in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language, most of whom were interested in going abroad to teach Mandarin, at least for a few years. But almost all of them reported difficulty finding any spots to go abroad the USA—lack of visas, funding, opportunities—despite the previously mentioned shortage of Chinese-language programs in the US. 

3) Lenience and substitution in foreign language requirements and standards. I've talked a bit about this last year, but the pattern continues. Foreign language requirements, both in secondary and higher education, are disappearing. Only 11 states currently have foreign language graduation requirements; 16 states have none; and 24 states have requirements that could be fulfilled by multiple different subjects, not just foreign language, according to the Report. It's this last group that is most concerning to me, because without further examination we might say that 35 states, a high percentage, have foreign language requirements. But the ability to substitute other courses, like art or computer programming, for foreign language, leads to far fewer students finishing high school with command of a second language. I personally know friends and relatives who, in lieu of continuing to study Spanish after years, enrolled in computer programming courses, and went on to forget Spanish entirely.

4) The forces motivating foreign language learning in the US. The sponsor of the K-12 Foreign Language Enrollment survey was a unit of the Department of Defense. The Armed Forces offer higher pay for the enlisted studying certain languages. There are specific programs in the Army to enlist speakers of languages other than English. The Critical Language Scholarship has an interest in offering languages that are of military and national security benefit to the US. See the pattern?

5) The assumption that knowing English will always work—so learning any other language is superfluous. At the end of the day, this logic, so deeply embedded in the structure of US society and education, seems to be the biggest obstacle in the way of US improving at language learning. And it is reinforced throughout the US, the globalized Internet, and the world. It helps explain why, even when there are thousands of Spanish language programs across the US, they often produce students who forget the language after high school. Until the majority Americans can conceptualize a truly globalized world that exists not only in conveniently translated or learned English, but in a multitude of languages, the US will continue to lag behind at language learning, stubbornly clinging to its majority monolingualism.

Do you have personal experience with any of the reasons above, or suggestions of other causes? I'd love to hear about it; you can email me at language_ambassadors@brown.edu. 

To follow up on last week's topic, I also wanted to share this recent paper about using artificial intelligence to allow a paralyzed woman to speak again. Despite my admittedly dim view on AI-voiced language, especially related to the future of language learning, there are certain bright spots that deserve attention as well.