With another graduation season in the pipeline we can expect the usual uptick in platitudes. I\u2019m going to slump down in my beach chair, though, and look at one thing that\u2019s not very platitudinous. Namely, I\u2019m going to look at the one glaring gap in the armor my peers and I had when we were launched into the world. <\/p>\n
The gap? Language. By which I mean the foreign type. <\/p>\n
Before I jump into this gap, let me note that, as usual, I am eating a cheeseburger as I hunker down in the shade here, so I can\u2019t spare a finger to wag at you or at anyone else. I\u2019m not a finger-wagger, and I\u2019m not trying to tell any students what they should or shouldn\u2019t do. I\u2019ve got no idea what you should do, other than keeping your greasy mitts off of my French fries.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m just pondering how my pals and I got caught flat-footed on the language front. I\u2019m also wondering if that situation has changed, notably regarding Asian languages. As we\u2019ll see, apparently it has not changed much. <\/p>\n
In high school we could study any language we wanted, as long as it was French, German, or Spanish. <\/p>\n
Eventually, though, after a decade in the real world, my peers were often scrambling to learn Japanese, Korean, or, more recently, Mandarin Chinese. <\/p>\n
For the sake of context, I\u2019ll note that the U.S., China, and Japan are the world\u2019s largest economies, with Germany, France, and the U.K. coming next.<\/p>\n
If you want to look at things slightly differently, I\u2019ll note that as a bloc, the European Union is the world\u2019s largest economy, slightly bigger than the U.S. <\/p>\n
Anyway, Americans, to the extent they care about foreign languages at all, are decidedly not enthusiastic about the Asian direction. In fact, this isn\u2019t just a language gap; it\u2019s a more like a language grand canyon.<\/p>\n
The data I\u2019ve got at hand is a few years old. If I can find anything more recent I\u2019ll pass it along, but for now I\u2019ll serve what I\u2019ve got available.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s how it shakes out: Just one out of every 288 public school (K-12) students was studying an Asian language as of the 2007-2008 school year. <\/p>\n
That\u2019s based on some data published by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in a 2011 report. I massaged this data a little because only Japanese and Chinese were broken out into national estimates, so I applied, very roughly, some other data regarding other Asian languages. <\/p>\n
But there\u2019s no need to pick nits here. The gist of the gig is the same no matter what. One out of 288 is such a small number that I\u2019ll walk you through some figures from the report just for a basic sanity check. Or maybe just for kicks. It\u2019s pretty interesting stuff.<\/p>\n
Overall, only 18.5 percent of U.S. K-12 public school students were enrolled in foreign language courses at all. And, of those enrolled in such courses, fully 72 percent opted for Spanish. A very distant second was French at 14 percent. So these two languages held 86 percent of foreign language enrollment between them. No other language even hit the 5 percent level, so the salami gets sliced thin at this point.<\/p>\n
And, in the case of the Asian languages, it\u2019s paper-thin. Japanese was about 0.8 percent and Chinese was under 0.7 percent, and they added up to 1.49 percent. I then added a bit (again, a rough estimate) to account for other languages (Korean, etc.), but the total for Asian languages still came to less than 2 percent. Applying this to the overall student population, not just that slice of it taking a foreign language, is how I came up with just one student out of 288.<\/p>\n
So even if enrollment rates have taken big leaps lately, they\u2019re jumping from such a small base they\u2019re not going to wiggle the needle much. <\/p>\n
In fact, the numbers are so small they don\u2019t even seem possible, pretty much like my checking account balance. I feel like a guy who is stepping into a crosswalk, looking to the left for traffic while a bus is coming at me from the right; I have an uneasy feeling but I don\u2019t actually see anything amiss.<\/p>\n
But until I get run over by some corrective revelation, I\u2019m going to reckon that there\u2019s a pretty big language gap straddling the Pacific. <\/p>\n
The Pacific\u2019s big gears all mesh right here on Saipan, so the islands have a front row seat to the action. Overall, for the ambitious, does the language gap present an opportunity? That\u2019s a topic for a different day, but it\u2019s something that will come to mind as graduation season feeds new people into the job market.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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