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April 24, 2004
Learn a Language
in Thirty Days?
By Domenico Maceri/HispanicVista.com
You can become fluent in Spanish in 30
days, according to a Berlitz ad. You can
also learn English or just about any
other language in the same time.
Jim Boulet, the
executive director of English First, a
group that advocates making English the
official language of the US, believes the
ad. He was therefore shocked to read that
in fact it takes as long as seven years
for immigrant children to learn English.
That's what the California Legislative
Analyst found after an exhaustive study.
If Boulet is right,
California's education establishment is
wasting taxpayers' money.
How long does it
really take to learn a language?
If you read an ad in
a newspaper or see a commercial on TV,
the answer is going to be a very short
period of time. The ad is supposed to
sell you the product. The ad does not
lie; it just presents a certain reality.
The fact is that
learning a language fluently to be able
to function at an educational or
professional level takes more than thirty
days of casual part-time study.
According to
research conducted by the Defense
Language Institute in Monterey,
California, which teaches languages to
our diplomats and military personnel, it
takes about six hundred hours of
instruction to reach a functional ability
with an "easy" language.
"Hard" languages such as
Korean, Japanese, Arabic or any other
having little or no connection to
English, take twice as long or even more.
The students at the DLI are highly
selected after a battery of tests to
determine that they are capable of
learning languages intensively. For the
average person, it probably takes longer.
What students at the
DLI have to do is learn the language,
i.e., the words. Immigrant kids, on the
other hand, need to learn English but at
the same time they have to acquire the
concepts behind the words. Thus, students
at the DLI need only learn that the
Spanish word for "president" is
"presidente." Adults know what
the president does. They know about the
political system. A kid from another
country, on the other hand, needs to
learn the meaning of the word but
also the ideas and other information
about "president." That takes a
long time.
Kids, however, do
have an advantage in learning languages
over adults. Kids can eventually
reproduce a native-like pronunciation.
Adults will in most cases retain some
kind of foreign accent.
Professional
educators take learning seriously and
don't put ads in newspapers or make
commercials to attract students by
promising miracle cures. They know that
it takes a long time to learn a language.
For children who come from other
countries, the California Legislative
Analyst's office found that it takes
anywhere from 3 to a maximum of 7 years.
The California Legislative Analyst
defined learning English as acquiring the
skills necessary so that an immigrant kid
could learn in a regular classroom
alongside of American kids without the
need of extra tutoring. So while
immigrant kids learn English, at the same
time they have to struggle not to fall
behind their US-born students in the
other school subjects.
Voters in
California, Arizona, and Massachusetts
eliminated bilingual education, giving
kids a year of immersion to learn
English. If thirty days is enough,
one year should be plenty.
The fact is that
years after implementing the one-year
immersion program, only 7% of immigrant
kids in California have been classified
as English proficient. That would make it
a 93% failure.
One third of
California’s kindergartners are
classified as English learners. If these
kids don’t learn English and become
educated, they’ll qualify only for
menial work. When kids don’t get a
good education, we all pay a
"price." Lack of education
translates into poverty, which increases
costs for all of us.
The education
establishment is not buying into facile
solutions to education. Although
the elimination of bilingual education in
California has had a negative effect on
immigrant kids’ educational
opportunities, the California Legislative
Analyst found that by twelfth grade only
10% of students are not classified as
fluent in English. These students who are
not yet fluent in all likelihood have not
been in the country very long.
In essence, most
immigrant kids are learning and that
augurs well not simply for them but for
the rest of society as well, even if you
can’t learn a language in thirty
days.
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Domenico Maceri (dmaceri@hotmail.com),
PhD, UC Santa Barbara, a contributing
columnist to HispanicVista.com (www.hispanicvista.com),
teaches foreign languages at Allan
Hancock College in Santa Maria, CA.
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