> On 6/23/06, Guest <lbodownload at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Say what you will about American schools, but nobody
> > who goes through 5 years of high school french *and
> > really applies himself* enters college unable to utter
> > a single intelligible sentence in french, but this
> > does happen in Taiwan, where children spend 10-15
> > years "studying" english (read: preparing for
> > standardized tests that ostensibly test ones english
> > ability) and come out of high school unable to
> > communicate with a foreigner.
>
> You are comparing apples and oranges: English is a compulsory subject
> in many Asian and other countries, but a foreign language is elective
> in most American schools. How many Americans take "5 years" of any
> foreign language at the secondary education level? That's a
> statistically insignificant population: "most of our students take no
> more than two years of foreign language at the high school level,
> usually in the ninth and tenth grades" (Elizabeth L. Webb, Chronicle
> of Higher Education,
> <http://chronicle.com/colloquy/2001/abroad/103.htm>). The result is
> that most Americans, other than first-generation immigrants, are
> decidedly monolingual (that is, if we set aside the fact that many of
> them have trouble writing in English, too).
>
> If American schools are to introduce foreign language as a subject of
> compulsory mass education for all, the result will certainly resemble
> Asian results, too: a few of them will major in it and become
> proficient in one foreign language or another, but the rest won't
> learn it enough to be able to use it as a means of rudimentary
> everyday communication, let alone professional communication (just as
> they don't learn any other subject well enough, except those they need
> for their professions).
>
> Compulsory foreign-language education has one virtue, though: it works
> as affirmative action for women, for women are better at learning a
> language, native or foreign, than men. If America makes foreign
> language education compulsory, and especially if it makes it a
> compulsory part of SAT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, etc., it will make women
> dominate the weaker sex even more than now in education.
> --
> Yoshie
> <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
> <http://mrzine.org>
> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
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