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OPINIONS
Diane Mufson: Americans must speak more than just English
My University of Vermont alumni magazine arrived this week. After checking the alumni gossip pages, a small article caught my eye. It began, "Caules vacas estan en celo?"
This Spanish phrase has become important in a state that had more cows than people in the mid 20th century and, aside from French-Canadians, has traditionally had few non-English speakers. Now that quite a few Latin Americans are working with Vermont dairy farmers, it is important for the farmers to know, "Which cows are in heat?"
The first week of March is designated as "National Foreign Language Week," which regardless of cows, makes it timely to discuss the importance of Americans increasing our limited foreign language skills.
While many recent immigrants speak a foreign language and have various degrees of facility in English, the great majority of Americans are monolingual; they communicate only in English.
As a nation founded by immigrants, it was and still is vitally important that we have a unified language, English, to simplify communication. But as our globe continues to shrink by way of mouse clicks and airplane flights, it has become apparent that even though many people throughout the world speak English, we Americans are at a disadvantage if most of us cannot speak with others in their native tongues.
This became obvious following 9/11. We learned that one of our country's great weaknesses was ability to adequately decipher communications of those who do not use English or even other European languages.
The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages indicates that about a third of American students in grades 7 to 12 are taking foreign languages, but more than 95 percent study only Spanish, French, German, Italian or Latin.
While we have a good number of Spanish-English bilingual people in this nation, we have only a limited number of people speaking or studying the less familiar but strategic languages needed for trade and development, such as Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Hindi and Russian.
USA Today reported that less than 1 percent of English-speaking high school students are exposed to the more esoteric and needed languages such as Japanese, Korean and Arabic.
The same article also noted that the Chinese have more than 200 million students studying English, but fewer than 24,000 Americans are studying the Chinese language. In everyday terms, this means that millions of Chinese will understand our conversations but only a tiny fraction of Americans will comprehend theirs.
In the 21st century, teaching foreign languages should be viewed as just as important as math, computers, science and social studies. Schools should be offering a variety of foreign languages to all students from an early age.
Our traditional way of teaching foreign languages to mainly college-bound high school students is ineffective. Developing fluency or even familiarity within another language also tends to increase comfort with and understanding of other cultures.
The world is shrinking, and non-English speaking countries with rapidly developing economies are becoming major forces in the global economy. For our nation's security and commerce, Americans must be able to communicate in other languages besides English.
While most of us have no need to know about reproduction schedules of cows in Spanish or any other language, we must encourage and teach younger generations a second or third language. In our ever-shrinking world, improved foreign language proficiency is vital for our nation.
Diane W. Mufson is a licensed psychologist in private practice in Huntington. She is a former citizen member of The Herald-Dispatch editorial board and is a regular contributor to The Herald-Dispatch editorial page. Her e-mail is dwmufson@comcast.net.
