Lenguage Learning In Usa

Language Learning in the United States of America Abdelilah Salim Sehlaoui Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Emporia State University, USA The USA has a great need for individuals with highly developed competencies in world languages. In fact, the need for individuals with proficiency in languages other than English has never been higher (Brecht & Rivers, 2000). According to Brecht and Ingold (2002), more than 70 government agencies reported a need for individuals with a language expertise other than English. To address these needs, under the direction of the President of the USA, the Secretaries of State, Education, and Defense, and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) have developed a national plan to expand US foreign language education beginning in early childhood (kindergarten) and continuing throughout formal schooling and into the workforce with new programmes and resources. doi: 10.1080/07908310802385873 Keywords: language and cognition, language attitudes, language minorities

Major Initiatives The Department of Education and its partners focus resources towards educating students, teachers, and government workers in critical need foreign languages, such as Arabic, Hindi, and Korean. These efforts also aim at increasing the number of advanced-level speakers in those and other languages. The Department of Education’s Fiscal Year 2007 budget proposal includes $57 million for this initiative, a $35 million increase over FY 2006. Among the programmes that this department created and supervises are: The Foreign Language Assistance Program (FLAP), visit: http://www.ed.gov/ about/offices/list/oela/index.html for more information. Advancing America Through Foreign Language Partnerships, visit: http:// www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ope/index.html?src¼oc for more information. Language Teacher Corps, visit: http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/opepd/ index.html?src¼oc E-Learning Language Clearinghouse, visit: http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/ list/ope/index.html?src¼oc Teacher-to-Teacher Initiative, visit: http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ ope/index.html?src¼oc Furthermore, since 1990, the US Department of Education has awarded Title VI grants to institutions of higher education in order to establish language resource centres (LRCs). The common goal of the LRCs is to promote 0790-8318/08/03 195-6 $20.00/0 LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND CURRICULUM

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the learning and teaching of foreign languages in the USA. Led by nationally and internationally recognised language professionals, the LRCs create language-learning materials, offer professional development workshops, and conduct research on foreign language learning. While some of the LRCs concentrate on specific language areas, other LRCs direct their attention to foreign languages in general (NFLRC, 2008). Today there are about 15 LRCs located in various parts of the country. For more information on each centre, visit http://nflrc.msu.edu/. The State Department programmes provide new opportunities for American high school students, undergraduates, and graduate students to study critical need languages abroad, and strengthen foreign language teaching in the USA through exchanges and professional development. President Bush requested $115 million in Fiscal Year 2007 for the National Security Language Initiative (NSLI), of which $26.7 million will support programmes managed by the Department of State. The programmes that this department offers are: US Fulbright Student Program, visit: http://us.fulbrightonline.org or www.iie.org Intensive Summer Language Institutes, visit: http://www.caorc.org/language Gilman Scholarships, visit: www.iie.org//programs/gilman Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistants, visit: http://www.exchanges. state.gov Teacher Exchange, visit: http://www.exchanges.state.gov Youth Exchanges: (1)

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Summer Language Institutes: provides US high school students the opportunity to study Arabic or Chinese language abroad. The programme includes Turkish, Hindi, and Russian languages. Academic Semester or Year Abroad: provides US high school students taking formal critical need language classes the opportunity to spend an academic semester or year studying the language abroad. School Partnerships: provides US schools linkages to foreign counterparts in critical need language countries (Russia, China, Turkey, India, and the Arab world) for interactive language programmes and exchanges of groups of students and teachers. Visit: http://exchanges.state.gov/education/citizens/students

The Department of Defense and the DNI have also developed programmes to address the need for individuals with highly developed competencies in word languages. The Center for Applied Linguistics’ (CAL) project is just one example of such efforts. The project is known as the English for Heritage Language Speakers 2005 – 2010 project which aims at helping heritage speakers of critical languages develop their English proficiency to high levels, with a particular focus on language skills specific to the federal workplace.

Language and Society However, unless some more comprehensive efforts are made, and unless societal attitudes change, much of the linguistic resources of the USA will

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still fail to be adequately exploited and, in particular, heritage languages (HLs) will be lost over time, both in the individuals who speak them and in their speech communities (Wiley, 1996). Hence comes the need for a more comprehensive strategic language planning policy and unified efforts (governmental, social, and individual) that can help protect the linguistic assets of this country. Besides the programmes and efforts made by the government, there are numerous professional organisations today that promote language education in various ways, but they need to work together now more than ever as Alatis (2001) argues, because their common goals and purposes are more obvious and more important than their differences. Among these organisations are: The American Philological Society (APS) Modern Language Association of America (MLA) National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) The Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) The American Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA) The National Association for Foreign Student Affairs (NAFSA) The National Association of Bilingual Education (NABE) The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) The American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) The International Association for World Englishes (IAWE) The National Foreign Language Center (NFLC) Other collaborative efforts gave birth to other organisations. For example, The National Council of Organisations of Less Commonly Taught Languages (NCOLCTL) is a collaborative effort between CAL and NFLC. ACTFL and MLA formed an advocacy group called the Joint National Committee for Languages and the National Council for Languages and International Studies (JNCL-NCLIS) which consists of 60 member associations. The goal of the last coalition is to unify the language profession. Since we cannot list and describe all the efforts made or being made to promote and strengthen language education in the USA, we can just mention one example. Due to the increasing interest and need to preserve HLs, the NFLC and the CAL launched the Heritage Language Initiative in 1999 in order to build an education system that is responsive to heritage speech communities and national language needs. This effort aims at producing a number of people able to function professionally in both English and another language (Brecht & Ingold, 2002). The Heritage Language Initiative identified some major needs and made some excellent recommendations for heritage speech communities to maintain and develop their languages and for the US education system to incorporate HL development in its programmes.

The Present Situation, and the Contents of this Issue According to Raymond (2005), the number of languages listed for the USA is 238. Among those, 162 are living languages, three are second language without

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mother-tongue speakers, and 73 are extinct. Due to time and space constraints in this special issue of Language, Culture and Curriculum, we will not be able to address each and every living language in this multilingual and multicultural society and the efforts made to preserve it. However, we hope this thematic special issue of this journal will contribute to shedding some light on the importance of languages as a natural resource in the USA. The indigenous spoken languages of the USA, and current efforts to revitalise and maintain them, are discussed by Dr Teresa L. McCarty. Most Native American languages are no longer acquired as a first language by children. They are nonetheless languages of identity and heritage and, in this sense, can and should be considered mother tongues. McCarty begins with a discussion of the present status of Native American languages, situating this within tribalcommunity contexts and the larger context of federal Indian policy. Drawing on several recent studies, she considers the impact of past and present policies on contemporary language attitudes and practices, particularly among Native American youth. The author then discusses indigenous language revitalisation and maintenance efforts currently under way and addresses the following questions: How effective have these initiatives been in promoting Native American languages as heritage mother tongues? How effective have they been in promoting Native students’ academic achievement? The article concludes by considering the challenges these initiatives face and their larger implications for indigenous self-determination, cultural survival, and linguistic pluralism in the USA. American sign language (ASL), the language of deaf people in the USA since the early nineteenth century, must also be considered as an indigenous language of this country. It is quite different from British sign language, both in its history and in its linguistic structures, and may even have been influenced by contact with American Indian sign language. In any case, it is a uniquely American phenomenon. Dr Katrina R. Miller reviews the origin and history of ASL, with special reference to its use in education, down to the present time. For a long period of its history, ASL was actively suppressed in schools for the deaf, in the belief that it was not in the long-term interests of the learners. It shares many problems with other smaller languages that have to compete with English for their survival but raises matters of equality in a more direct form. There was a strong resistance to the status of ASL as a natural language of any kind until recent times, and a corresponding reluctance to make provision either for teaching it or using it as a medium of instruction. Dr Miller deals with a key issue for the deaf community in the USA at the present time, the acceptance of ASL in third-level education, an issue that encapsulates many of the problems facing the language. The special place of Spanish in the history of the USA is dealt with by Dr David Barnwell. Although Spanish was the first European language to be spoken in the area that is now the USA, and the only language in some parts of it for long periods of their histories, its vitality in recent times does not stretch back in an unbroken tradition to its earlier period of dominance. Even in the 1960s French could claim an equal status with Spanish, based on the number of high school students learning the two languages. While many language professionals working with the smaller languages of the USA look with envy at the position of Spanish, given the large number of native speakers

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and non-native learners of the language, and the strong presence of a Spanishspeaking culture both within and just beyond its borders, the central argument of the paper is that the high number of native speakers of Spanish and nonnative learners of the language in the USA should not mask a number of serious issues facing the language in the country. Barnwell concludes his essay by pointing out that while the Spanish language in the USA enjoys health in terms of gross numbers, American society gives no indication of moving towards bilingualism. Dr Andrew Byon describes the dramatic rise in the number of students learning Korean in the USA in the last two decades. There are now almost 1000 Korean community schools (double the figure in the early 1990s) in which 8000 teachers are teaching Korean to some 70,000 students. The author looks in detail at the instructional settings in which the learning of Korean is taken place, from kindergarten and elementary school to university, sometimes with government support and sometimes on a voluntary basis. The author argues that further developments in the teaching of Korean in the USA will have to take into account the growing pedagogical conflict that is apparent in educational objectives, learning resources, and teaching methods, between Korean when it is taught as an HL (KHL), often with significant initial competences and environmental support, based on the use of the language in the home, and Korean when it is taught as a foreign language (KFL) to learners who are complete beginners and who come from a non-Korean background. Dr Anh Tran’s article deals with Vietnamese language education in the USA. Like other ethnic minorities, the Vietnamese immigrants have encountered a problem in their assimilation to the American culture: loss of the mother tongue among the second and the third generations. The article begins with this problem and continues with the efforts of Vietnamese-Americans to deal with it, in particular, the work of the Vietnamese language schools that enjoy community support. The article then moves on to the two main goals and benefits of such efforts: maintaining the language and preserving the culture. Tran presents some examples of how the language has been put to good use from the language-as-asset perspective. She also discusses perspective of language-as-resource, namely the movement for Vietnamese language classes in universities and promising pedagogical approaches to the Vietnamese language education in the USA. Dr Manjula Shinge tackles the Asian Indians or the people of India and their HLs. Shinge discusses why Hindi is included in the NSLI, why it should be taught in the USA, and what efforts are currently being made to meet those goals. The metaphor melting pot which was used to describe the USA during the last century has undergone changes in the last two decades. Recent immigrants are aware that they may not be able to merge into US society as seamlessly as their earlier counterparts did, hence they resolve to maintain their ethnic identities. The USA is now more like a mosaic, a country made up of people with different cultures and languages, living together in harmony. Globalisation has acted as a catalyst for the USA to recognise their need to learn foreign languages so that they can retain their competitive edge and be able to communicate with the rest of the world. Globalisation has also acted as a catalyst in India, the largest democracy in the world, and influenced its rapid economic growth since the 1990s.

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In the concluding article, Dr Abdelilah S. Sehlaoui describes the efforts that have been made in recent decades to provide support, at both local and governmental levels, for the teaching of Arabic in the USA. He also makes some general observations on national language resources. While acknowledging the role of societal efforts, governmental policies, financial support, and community resources in the process of preserving HLs and language resources in general, the author draws special attention to the individual’s role. Based on the development of his own personal literacies, stretching back to his childhood in Morocco, and over 20 years teaching–learning experience as an English as a Second Language/English as a Foreign Language teacher, language learner, and TESOL teacher educator in the USA, the author develops a rationale for the acquisition and teaching of languages in general, whether first, second, foreign, global, indigenous, or heritage. In this broad and critical perspective, he draws attention to the most distinctive features of HL learning in the USA, including the demands made on parents, the large role played by culture and literacy in the maintenance of HLs, and the need to think of HL learning as a variety of language learning that must constitute a ‘dialogue’ in a deeper than usual sense if it is to be successful. He notes, however, that these components of language learning apply in a special way to HLs and are nonetheless universal components of all language learning. Dr Sehlaoui points to the benefits that may be expected from bringing these components into greater prominence in all of the current programmes to develop the language resources of the USA. Correspondence Any correspondence should be directed to Professor Abdelilah Salim Sehlaoui, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Emporia State University, Campus Box 24, 1200 Commercial Street, Emporia, KS 66801, USA ([email protected]). References Alatis, J. (2001) The genealogy of language organizations and heritage language initiative. In J.K. Peyton, D. Ranard and S. McGinnis (eds) Heritage Languages in America: Preserving a National Resource (pp. 317–322). McHenry, IL and Washington, DC: Delta Systems and Center for Applied Linguistics. Brecht, R.D. and Ingold, C.W. (2002) Tapping a National Resource: Heritage Languages in the United States. Washington, DC: National Foreign Language Center. ERIC Digest EDO-FL-02-02. Brecht, R.D. and Rivers, W.P. (2000) Language and National Security in the 21st Century: The Role of Title VI/Fulbright-Hays in Supporting National Language Capacity. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt. NFLRC (2008) National Foreign Language Resource Center, Available at http:// nflrc.msu.edu/. Raymond, G., Jr. (ed.) (2005) Ethnologue: Languages of the world (15th edn). Dallas, Tx: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com/. Wiley, T.G. (1996) Literacy and Language Diversity in the United States. McHenry, IL and Washington, DC: Delta Systems and Center for Applied Linguistics.