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,

[apintrix.livejournal.com]

I've heard that all public schools in the US once offered some combination of French, Spanish, and German, but after WWII German got axed and it was just French and Spanish...

The French classes in my school were always about half Haitian immigrants, who kicked all of our asses at it. I would never have met most of those kids otherwise. That was pretty cool.

[cerebralpaladin.livejournal.com]

I'm deeply skeptical about claims about "all public schools in the US" prior to roughly the 1980s. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare wasn't created until 1949; the Department of Education wasn't spun off into its own federal department until 1980. Throughout US history, and to a very significant degree even today, education decisions were state and local level decisions. So it seems much more likely that most US public schools or that all public schools in NYS or whatever offered French, Spanish, and German than that all public schools everywhere did anything. Also, there was hostility to Romance language instruction in various places because of anti-Catholicism, as well as anti-German sentiment during and after WW1. Nebraska, at least, passed a law in 1919 prohibiting all foreign language instruction (as well as all instruction in foreign languages) in private or public schools; that law got struck down as applied to private schools in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), but I suspect that it would have been upheld as applied to public schools.

In my school's case, French, Spanish, and German were all offered starting in 7th grade, with Italian added in 9th grade. My town also had a very large Italian-American population, but the weird effect of only offering Italian in 9th grade (and encouraging students who might be interested in taking it to take Spanish or French first) was that the Italian courses were basically filled with the worst students in the school--students who had done really badly in Spanish, and decided that starting over at the 1 level was better than continuing on--and then a handful of other students who for whatever reason REALLY wanted to learn Italian, or ended up in a weird place with their language instruction and decided to start over. It was an odd set up.

[drwex]

My central-NJ district offered German alongside French, Spanish, and Italian at the high school level in the late 1970s. After one year Italian was dropped because the person who taught it moved on and the school couldn't find someone fluent in the language and willing to teach it. YMMV as always.

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

My mother taught in a school system that offered three years of Russian. In the early seventies. It was weird at the time (only reason they had it was it was in a military town and a lot of the military families knew how much Russian language skills were in demand at Defense and State), and it's even weirder now. She never found a program to teach in again, not that she looked particularly hard for one.

[quietann.livejournal.com]

My high school was a math-science-computers magnet, and for some reason the school district decided that this school was the one that needed to offer Russian. Maybe it was a Cold War remnant???

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

Maybe it was a Cold War remnant???

Indirectly -- By that time, all significant mathematics was published in English, except for stuff from the Soviet block, which was in Russian. And since mathematics isn't expensive to do and has no political overtones, the Soviet block and the Soviets particularly were very good at mathematics. By the time I got to grad school in math, the only foreign language needed for reading current mathematics was Russian.

[quietann.livejournal.com]

You know my sister-in-law teaches Japanese in a public school in Anchorage, AK, right? It's always had a following there, but when manga and anime became popular, the demand skyrocketed. It was precisely what the kids wanted (and still is.)

Anchorage actually has a K-12 Japanese immersion school, though I don't think that's where my SIL teaches.

My niece and nephew are trilingual -- English, Japanese, and Spanish. They speak Japanese when they don't want my brother to know what they are talking about!

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

My high school had Spanish, French, German Italian Latin Japanese.

My friends have first graders learning Chinese, so the whole family has to.

[storyjen.livejournal.com]

That would be us! (Hi!) We're having lots of fun with the Chinese so far!

My town had French, Spanish, and Latin at the middle school level, and added German, Russian, and Chinese at the high school level. There may have been Italian too, I'm not quite sure.

My brother took Chinese his last year of high school, purely because he hadn't been doing well in Spanish but was counseled that he needed another year of language - and it changed his life. Because he took it in high school, he continued it in college. Because he took it in college, he met lots of friends who were taking it. Because his friends were interested in a Chinese semester abroad, he applied for that too, and got in. He ended up double-majoring in Psychology and Chinese, living in China for a long time, going to grad school for Chinese Political Science, and now lives in Singapore with his Chinese wife and his bilingual kids.

I, on the other hand, took Latin, which was awesome for vocabulary and spelling, and French, which I now use not at all. How I wish I had taken Spanish!

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

:boggle:
How do you know R-ness??

Small world small world small world

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

My high school had at least French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Latin. They may have had Japanese. I took German.

[redbird]

My high school (grades 7-12) offered French, Spanish, German, and Latin. I took Spanish, because it seemed the most practical choice (this was New York City in 1975). Three years later, my brother chose Latin, I think because I hadn't.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

My high school had French, Spanish, and German. My suspicion is that the language menu has always been determined by some sense of how valuable it would be to know the language in question for access to world culture and business. Italy was early to the Renaissance but late to forming a nation-state and industrialization, so by the 1900s, Italian wouldn't be high on the priority list for being a highly-educated person.

that the kids cared about, as opposed to teaching them languages that some upper-middle class people considered "cultured".

Education has never been about what kids care about, and always about what upper-middle class people consider cultured. (If the kids cared about it, you wouldn't have to herd them into schools to make them learn it!)

[drwex]

Thing 1 chose to do Latin despite our urgings toward Spanish, which I regard as eminently practical.

[aelf.livejournal.com]

I moved enough that I don't have a "my schools offered." When we lived in Northern Va, one of the foreign languages offered in HS was Russian, and I think it was for diplomatic/cold war stuff. Otherwise, most schools offered the standard French, Spanish, and German. Latin was offered in one of the HS.

My daughter's elem school (K-5) offers French or Spanish (Both up to 2nd grade, and in 3rd grade the kids choose to specialize). In Middle School (6-8) the choices are French, Spanish, Chinese, Latin. Upper school has more choices, but I haven't looked at what they all are. French, Spanish, Chinese, and Latin continue. I think Arabic is an option and a couple others.

My brother took Spanish in HS, and when he was doing factory work he complained that he hadn't learned Mexican Spanish and things were different enough to require thought.

[mamamoira.livejournal.com]

My junior high offered Spanish, and my high school offered Spanish and also shared a French teacher with another school (small school in a medium-sized district). My Spanish teacher in high school was a native German speaker. But no German class.

The school district we're in now runs everyone through a semester of Spanish in 6th grade, then offers actual Spanish and French classes starting in 9th grade (but you can get special permission to start them in 8th grade).

Around these parts, anyway, if a school is going to offer a second language at all, it will be Spanish, on the theory that it's actually more practical.