View Content #22094

by Stephanie Knight, CASLS Language Technology Specialist

World language educators have the distinct honor of preparing all students, regardless of their socioeconomic backgrounds, for participation in an increasingly globalized world. Ideally, learners develop a creative skill set, a problem solving skill set, and a communication skill set as they participate in this preparation. While all of these skill sets are cultivated across subject areas, world language educators are credited with providing learners with an incredibly tangible skill-the ability to communicate in more than one language. This skill not only requires lexical and grammatical competencies, but also emphasizes the development of intercultural and pragmatic competencies as critical. In a world in which computer-mediated communication erases the barriers of distance and time, the development of language proficiency is important for the active participation of all people within the global society.

Still, the potential of world language education is limited by the issue of access. This most obvious presentation of this issue is the lacking variety of languages that are available to student learners. Educative institutions in the United States generally valorize European languages over other more widely-spoken languages. For example, in 2013, only 64 post-secondary students were enrolled in Bengali courses in the United States, though almost 193 million people speak the language globally (Friedman, 2015). When this systemic preference is coupled with other issues such as the fact that less than one percent of American adults indicate proficiency in the world language or world languages that were studied in school (Friedman, 2015), the issue of access becomes self-perpetuating. Quantities of proficient world language teachers are insufficient to meet learner needs, and fewer learners are likely to become teachers than is necessary given the relative lack of access to education. In educational institutions with insufficient funding to fill in the gaps created by the aforementioned issues, the effect of limited access is palpable.

Nevertheless, language educators have the power to alleviate some of the strains put on schooling through the systemic issues already outlined. Jones (2016) cites the work of Colclough (2012) writing, “From the Chicago Public School system to the slums of Jakarta, locations of predominately minority groups get the runt of educational quality” (p. 861). This reality presents a hurdle indeed, but the hurdle is not insurmountable. Instead it emphasizes the critical nature of cultivating new approaches to language learning that are more relevant to learners’ cultural contexts. By extension, educators must value and utilize the informal learning experiences that their learners engage in when cultivating classroom tasks. The specific classroom strategies employed to utilize these experiences should not be overly westernized. Instead, Jones (2016) makes the call that practitioners and researchers document learning strategies employed by marginalized communities so that educators may appropriate them in the educative context. This appropriation should be collaborative in order to be authentic, and then educators may succeed in recontextualizing the backgrounds of learners, no matter their socioeconomic levels, as valuable springboards into the attainment of new knowledge and skill sets. The relatively high levels of intercultural competence that many world language educators enjoy make world language educators well-positioned to lead this charge.

References

Friedman, A. (2015). America’s lacking language skills. The Atlantic. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/05/filling-americas-language-education-potholes/392876/.

Jones, A. H. (2016). The discourse of language learning strategies: Towards an inclusive approach. International Journal of Inclusive Education. 20 (8). 855-870.