Second language instruction in my old middle and high school, way back when.

[randomness]

My old middle school started us on a second language in sixth grade. This was pretty good for the time. You had the choice of French or Spanish. In ninth grade, when we got to high school, they added German and Latin.

It struck me today that this was an odd choice of languages for a town that had a plurality, if not a majority, of Italian-Americans. If you went by ethnicity, I'd think you'd have gone with Italian and Irish as your elective languages. (Nearly all the Italian, Irish, and Polish kids were being raised Catholic, so that might have had something to do with why they offered Latin.)

Clearly there were practical issues. Finding teachers would have been harder. Most of the students were at least a generation or two away from actually using the language at home. Generally, the Italian kids I grew up with couldn't manage any more than a few curses in Italian, and that only in Neapolitan dialect. So you'd have to deal with the whole Neapolitan vs. standard Italian issue. Some kids actually did speak it at home, so you'd have to produce skill-appropriate classes for them as well.

And back then, there was still some sentiment among immigrants that when you came to America you got rid of your old language as a part of assimilation rather than hone it as another useful skill. So it's certainly possible that there wasn't anywhere near as much interest as there would be today.

But thinking back from the early 21st century at the apathetic kids in my classes, I can't help thinking you'd have gotten more engagement if you'd actually offered languages that the kids cared about, as opposed to teaching them languages that some upper-middle class people considered "cultured".

At least we had second language instruction.

Comments

[gingicat]

Interestingly, many of my friends in middle school and high school had the problem of "I speak Spanish at home, I thought this would be easy" but Castilian Spanish was different enough from Puerto Rican and Dominican that they had a hard time... plus, not getting formal grammar in your parents' language till the age of 12 can be really difficult. But I suspect that you know that :)

[randomness]

not getting formal grammar in your parents' language till the age of 12 can be really difficult. But I suspect that you know that :)

Funnily enough that could also have been my experience, as I didn't hit a formal course in Mandarin until my first year in college. But my parents taught me standard Mandarin as spoken by educated Chinese, which was really the easiest thing for them because they *were* university-educated Chinese. That's the Mandarin that's also formally taught; no surprise there. So I have "proper" Mandarin grammar hard-coded in my head about as well as I have "proper" English grammar in my head.

(I generally have to sit for a moment after I reflexively realize whether something is correct or incorrect to explain why. The process is the same in both languages, where it isn't in my head the same way in French, which I didn't learn until about age 12.)

Some of the Cantonese-speakers in my undergraduate Mandarin classes really had trouble with pronounciation. On the other hand, some of the kids who had gone to Chinese-language afterschool programs for their entire school careers before arriving at college breezed through undergraduate Mandarin more easily than I did, as they basically had learned all the material years before starting the class.

[gingicat]

That's pretty cool, actually. Wish I'd known when we were looking for native Mandarin speakers at Dragon (to build the Mandarin speech recognition).

I absorbed English grammar and spelling through reading at least three books a week, and colloquial educated spoken English from my parents. Apparently my pronunciation of the word "drawer" (as in what goes into a bureau) as one syllable is weird,