LEARNING LANGUAGES: anecdotes from the net. J. Manuel Urrutia" >Learning a language well is a long process. jim blair: I am not up on the literature on language instruction. But I don't think the current US schools do a very good job. I studied Spanish for 2 years in college. I got B's, and could once read Mystical poetry from the middle ages in the original. But I could never carry on a conversation in Spanish. I wonder if the standard 45 minute class a few days a week is the most effective way to teach a language. You seem convinced that it is. I claim that language is unlike other subject matter. 5 year old kids all over France speak French (typically better than US college students who study French), but few if any of those kids studied French. But this does not apply to physics: the US college physics students know more physics than the French 5 year olds. French is DIFFERENT than physics. Matthew Devney wrote: With total immersion, they will be ready to join a regular class (albeit at a significant disadvantage) in just a few months. Not the 2-4 years you get with bilingual education. At my high school graduation, I was surprised to learn that there were several kids who didn't speak English. When I asked (someone who *did*), I found out that half of them had been in the Oakland Public Schools bilingual program for over a decade. On the other hand, there was a friend of mine, Jesus. (Hay-ZOOS, people -- he's Mexican.) He had moved to America in the tenth grade. I remember his first day in class; he didn't speak a word of English. Okay, maybe *a* word. The ESL and bilingual classes were all full, so he got stuck in 4 of my 6 classes. By the time September of 11th grade rolled around, he was completely fluent, and you had to listen hard to hear an accent. So in my experience, total immersion is better. Or maybe not, if you count emotional scarring. But there's really no way to tell, now is there? Point made on Washington Journal this morning, by an ESL teacher, no less: "If you want to learn French, you go to France, and immerse yourself in their culture and language. Bilingual education just doesn't work." All right, now onto another personal experience. I know it's anecdotal evidence, but at least it's evidence. My girlfriend moved here to the US when she was 8 years old. She spoke only Spanish at the time. She couldn't function in Jefferson Elementary School, because it was mostly in English. And her bilingual classes were a joke. Want to know why? Their new concepts were ones that she was expected to know by the time she was in first grade. So she mostly ignored those classes. The supposed hour of homework every night was over within minutes, and she could learn English then. And within a year, she was fluent. And you know what? She didn't have to be held back at all. You know why? Because Mexico, with its pitiful educational system, is still better than America's. So she successfully learned English in less than 1 year, and despite ignoring all other subjects for that entire year, was still ahead of most Americans. This story has 2 morals: 1, you CAN learn English in 1 year, and 2, most countries' schools are far enough ahead of America's that incoming students can take a year off without too many ill effects. Michael Hodges: I had the same experience with my two kids in Germany, ages 5 and 8. In their neighborhood they quickly learned German, and to this day speak quite fluently without accent. When my daughter attended college here, as a sophomore she picked up an elective called 'senior German seminar', a course intended for seniors majoring in German - - she passed the entry quiz and scored straight A's. I mention this, not because she is so brilliant but because she had no formal training in German, having only her childhood kinder Deutsche which was sufficient to blow away seniors majoring in the subject. Our son went on to his degree in international finance and is working topside with a major German company where he uses German every day - when he was married his Germany neighborhood friend flew over to be his best man. I mention this, as it goes along with your own experience: total immersion at a very young age, as then kids learn quickly without adult hang-ups - - far superior than many majoring in the subject. I have also seen in these newsgroups foreign teachers expressing amazement at the fact that US schools do not require teachers of foreign languages to be fluent in that language and to also have had experience living in the foreign country to assure fluency and cultural differences of the real world. When I first arrived in Germany as CEO of a medium size firm I was certainly aware that my challenges lay not only in the area of turning around a firm in deep financial trouble, but that I was dealing with a language foreign to me (never had any German training), in addition to dealing with differences in culture, mentality, currency, accounting practices, etc. I thought I would resolve the language problem easily: I hired a full-time tutor and planned an hour per day. Result: I learned zilch. Reason: besides being too busy with the business challenges, as an adult I found myself 'hung-up' on getting each word and phrase perfect before I would utter anything outside the office. Stupid? Yep, but factual. I tried visiting a store where no one knew me to try out my German, but was often answered in English as the German sales person was delighted at the chance to test her own English learning from school days. I gave up, stuck to a trust-worthy interpreter and was lucky to handle the business with minimal German. Meanwhile, my two small grammar school children were learning German quickly, fluently and without accent - - as being so young they were not stymied by adult 'hang-ups' to get it perfect before they answered their new neighborhood friends." I even noticed my daughter, when with a new but older friend from England picking the British way of pronouncing certain words - - yet at home she spoke normal 'American.' Bottom-line: kids can learn faster foreign languages quicker than you would think, if they are young enough and fully exposed to others near their age. Kids are great learners - and eager to learn, especially when with others. They seem like language is zero barrier, and don't even know what a 'hang-up' is. I mention this story because in my many years of international experience I have found the above experience repeated by so many others. Conclusion: Full immersion, full speed - - with minimal adult 'supervision'. I prepared my web page on bilingual education http://home.att.net/~mwhodges/bilingual-education.htm ) because many readers of my Education Report requested it. When researching for that I was amazed at the amount of material out there 'justifying' such education without (in my view) clean data as a base. "Eric Fowler" When I was a kid, my Dad was in the Embassy, and we lived in Asia - first in Indonesia, then Taiwan. In Indonesia, my brother and I were cared for by a woman who spoke Tamil and Indonesian, so my first words were in Tamil and Indonesian. My older brother had already started speaking in English, and added Indonesian and Tamil to his arsenal. We lived in Indonesia for two years, and when we left, I was 2-1/2 and "speaking" three languages as a 2-year-old(not that 2-y.o.'s have fully developed language), namely, English, Tamil, and Indonesian, my English being the weakest. I remember thinking that English was a special language for grownups, and Indonesian for children. John and I spoke Indonesian to our parents and with each other. My mother and father spoke English with each other, and most of our house guests were Americans, and spoke English. We moved to the US for a few months, then to Taiwan. Both of my parents studied Mandarin Chinese, and became conversant(Mom) and fluent(Dad), an extremely difficult task. John and I dropped Indonesian and Tamil, and picked up Mandarin. When we left Taiwan, we spoke English and Mandarin roughly at a par with American or Taiwanese kids our age(8 and 10 years), plus we could get by in the other Chinese dialect spoken on Taiwan. During this time, we spoke English and Mandarin interchangeably with our parents. Upon arrival in the US, we dropped all Asian languages in favor of English. My parents continue to speak Chinese. Interestingly, I have made two attempts to learn languages in the classroom since then (German in High School, Russian in college), neither of which took. When we were in Asia, we attended an American public school, which was open to sons and daughters of American Government employees, and to our counterparts from nations politically friendly to the US: Norway, the UK, Hong Kong, Japan, France, Germany, etc. In this setting, our multilingualism was the norm. Almost all of my peers spoke their native language at home, plus English if they were not from an English-speaking country(instruction in the classroom was in English). Most of them spoke Chinese as well, and many of them still retained fragments of languages from the last country they were posted in. Neither John nor I ever received any formal instruction in any language but English, and I recall no effort in picking up and using the new languages. We simply absorbed them as if from the air, used them as long as we needed them, and discarded them when we moved on. Today, I speak no language but English. I can recognize Mandarin when I hear it spoken and see it written, but cannot understand it: it is a familiar-sounding gabble. Now, I read and hear about daily struggles in the classroom to get kids to pick up a few words and phrases of Spanish or French, or to speak English with a particular inflection or in a certain vernacular form. It seems absurd, really, and if anyone were paying attention, they would notice the millions of Americans who have achieved Spanish/English bilingualism effortlessly. In New Mexico, home of some of the worst public schools in America, it is not unheard of to meet people who are trilingual (English, Spanish, Navaho or Hopi), yet who have difficulty reading and writing in any language. There is ample evidence to show that classroom instruction in language is usually ineffective and daily casual exposure almost always results in fluency, yet the schools remain addicted to their precious classrooms .... Jim Blair: When people need to learn a language, they learn it quickly. Especially when they are young. I was a college teacher and spent a summer in Israel with my wife and 2 kids, ages 3 and 8. I tried to study Hebrew a little, but was mostly with people who could speak English. At the end of the summer, I knew very little Hebrew. But both of my kids could speak it pretty well. I was surprised when my 8 year old son was counting some things: "ehod, steim, shlosh, arba",...etc. And when the kids were loud out side the apartment my 3 year old would shout "SHEKIT! HABITE HA!" (roughly, BE QUIET, GO HOME!) Neither of the kids "studied" Hebrew, they just played with the kids in the neighborhood, and learned it from them. The UW has, for example, French House for students of that language. They speak only French any time they are home: meals, evenings. etc. They import students from France to live there and speak French. This total immersion concept has proven to be the most effective way to teach a language. Some additional thoughts on the issue of young kids learning language. It is claimed by bilingual advocates that a child must learn their first language well before they can learn another. This "fact" is used as a justification for delaying the intensive study of English: kids just can't learn two different languages at the same time. I was flying back from Israel and witnessed a strange conversation on the plane between and Orthodox Jew, his more secular wife, and their son, about 6 or 8 years old. ASIDE: you need to understand that for many orthodox Jews, the use of Hebrew in casual conversation is considered sacrilegious: the Holy Language is for discussing the Bible or related texts and subjects only. The husband was speaking to his wife in Yiddish, and she was responding in Hebrew. I had never heard a conversation carried on in two different languages at once before, and since I don't speak either, I consulted with others on the plane to be sure I was hearing this. (Yiddish sounds like German. and sounds quite different from Hebrew even for people who can't understand either: it is easier to tell the difference between the two as SPOKEN than as written, since they both use the same Hebrew alphabet). Anyway, then the boy joined the conversation. I was curious as to which language he would use. He spoke in Yiddish to his father but used Hebrew when addressing his mother. He would switch languages in the middle of a sentence if he turned from one parent to the other! I was told that he had no accent in either language, and he had no problem dealing with both on an equal level. So what does that do to the idea that kids must master one language before they can learn another? In fact I didn't think to give the example of my wife. She was in a different language school until her family moved to the US when she was in 3rd grade. She was sent to a convent to learn English after her regular classes for some months before the move, but indicated that she quickly adjusted to school in the US: she does remember that the people here "talked funny" at first (the Convent taught British English). And when I told my wife that many now claim that it takes 4 to 7 years for new immigrant kids to learn English she was amazed. "Oh, it does NOT", she said, and thought I was kidding. She was doing fine in school the first term she was here. This makes the Unz Proposition in California look reasonable: it would provide an entire year of intensive English to LEP's. I see delaying English but teaching science or other subjects in Spanish as like this problem: you have a car and need to go to a city 500 miles away. You want to get to the destination and learn how to drive. The "ESL solution" is "learn to drive, and then take the car". The "bilingual education" solution is, "start walking. Along the way we will have some driving lessons. And maybe by the time you get there, you will have learned how to drive". I suspect that the "fact" that it takes 4-7 years to learn English (as determined by the bilingual lobby) has been created with other goals in mind. And finally this from a correspondent. It sounds all too believable. Just think about the financial incentives for bilingual education. Pat, I am mixed on Bilingual Ed. I can argue both sides. Much depends on at what age etc the student hits US schools. One of my daughter-in-laws teaches five yr olds, all from Mexico in the Pharr, San Juan, Alamo public schools . When she started three years ago the word came down to hold back on the English instruction -because the school received more outside financial aid with more non-English speaking students. Last year a lower level "boss" told her "Teach them English but be discreet about it". MY EDUCATION BACKGROUND I should point out that I taught college for 13 years and have a Wisconsin certification to teach high school science: chemistry, physics, earth science or biology. I have had quite a bit of contact with teachers, both college and K-12. I attended a private college, taught at two more, and have lived in Madison and "hung around" the UW for 40 years, working and taking classes. I go to most of the Madison Teachers (K-12) convention meeting (my wife is a member) because I am interested in many of the topics that are discussed there. I find most college teachers to be intellectual and interesting, most K-12 teacher to be dull and not especially interested in learning new things. (of course there are exceptions both ways, but I think the generalization is accurate). While the Madison teachers have a paid professional day to attend these conventions, few do. Most just use it as a holiday. At the latest, I was at a presentation on new discoveries in genetics, given by a UW genetics professor. About two dozen Madison teachers were there. The biggest crowd was to hear Green Bay Packer Reggie White. (That was a month ago; yesterday Reggie spoke to the Wisconsin legislature and he made the national news. So maybe the teachers made the right choice after all). I took all the education courses needed for the high school certification. But also, as a Navy Reserve Petty Officer, I took a 2 week Navy "instructor training school" and found that all anyone needs to know about TEACHING can be learned in two weeks. The rest of good teaching is common sense combined with knowing the subject being taught. I hear that some college professors are not good. But most that I had were. Even at the BIG UW, the complaints are directed less against professors than against "the system" that has classes taught by graduate students rather than professors. ,,,,,,, _______________ooo___(_O O_)___ooo_______________ (_) jim blair (jeblair@facstaff.wisc.edu) For a good time call http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/4834