Most people realize that American students lag far behind the rest of the world when it comes to learning a second language, but far less has been written about how our poor language skills are creating economic disadvantages for U.S. businesses and are raising national security concerns.
Virtually all European and Asian elementary students study a second language, but a new survey by the RAND Corp. found that 97 percent of Ohio and Kentucky students do not because their elementary schools do not offer a foreign language. While many American students take at least a year or two of a foreign language in high school, most do not learn enough to effectively communicate in their second language.
That’s because studies clearly show that the ideal time to learn a second language is during the early elementary years. Language experts say the U.S. approach to language education continues to be too late and too disjointed. Indeed, the most skilled bilingual students in many U.S. elementary schools are foreign-born students who speak English at school and their native language at home.
The Committee for Economic Development has put a price tag on the inadequate language skills and poor cultural competence of the vast majority of American students: $2 billion a year.
While most American educators realize that elementary school is the best time to begin learning a second language, there is no great push to begin teaching foreign languages in the second and third grade. Most teachers likely would say they have more important things to teach children at that age.
Maybe if more Americans realized the negative economic impact of our poor language skills, our schools would begin placing greater emphasis on the need to become bilingual.
Too many Americans are ill-prepared to compete in an increasingly global economy because we don’t speak the language. That needs to change.
