Shelby Johnson

Staff Writer

   Freshman year, at the ripe old age of 14, I was offered the opportunity to take Spanish in school.  I immediately signed up for the course in Spanish, which is the native language of the area of the world in which I’m interested, and also because the class is  mandatory for pre-college curriculum.  Though I didn’t know any Spanish other than what little my mother, a former Spanish teacher, had taught me, I was excited to learn.

    My expectation was that I would understand and grasp Spanish words, sentences, and concepts, just as I would in any other class. However, from the first class, I struggled to comprehend and retain Spanish lessons more than I did in classes that were familiar to me like math, science, English, and history. In those classes, we might be learning more difficult ideas, but the vocabulary was the same as it had been since kindergarten and before.  My Spanish pronunciation as well as my writing and reading developed slowly, and I grappled with even the most elementary of assignments.  I felt like a second grader could do better than I was doing with the Spanish language.

    As it turns out, a second grader probably could learn a new language better than I could as a freshman.  Language is grasped as a student’s brain develops, and the earlier a student starts studying a language, the more likely he or she is to achieve fluency. When a child is at the peak of his or her learning stage, language is picked up by oral repetition.  When a child learns to speak English, he or she learns to conjugate words as he or she hears them, and then continues to learn that language in primary education. It’s the same thing with foreign language in primary education.  We should be immersed in foreign language the same way that we learn English: by ear, by repetition, and at an early age.  Learning a foreign language isn’t an easy task as high school students because when taught details of the language, like conjugating verbs, the students don’t have that background of hearing the verbs in conversation, like they did in their home language.

    Foreign languages need to be offered in schools at earlier grades.  It is easier for younger students to comprehend conjugation and grammar than for high schoolers, and being bilingual can give opportunities for jobs later in life.

    According to Arnold Karnes at education.stateuniversity.com, “At the beginning of the twenty-first century, proficiency in only one language is not enough for economic, societal, and educational success. Global interdependence and mass communication often require the ability to function in more than one language.” In the globally-oriented 21st century, being bilingual is almost a necessity in a competitive job market.  Learning a language throughout all years of education, K-12, would enable students to have a better chance of getting a job.  Hiring multi-lingual employees is beneficial and almost necessary for companies hoping to be internationally competitive.”

    So, we know that the earlier you learn and understand a language the better chance you have to become fluent. If a student is fluent, he or she is more likely to get a job. The purpose of a school is to make students successful, so a successful student in turn means a successful school. One key to being a successful school system could be offering foreign languages in elementary school.