Contemplating a Curriculum for Human Languages Literacy, Part 2: A language can be analyzed and studied as science
This blog entry is the second (2nd) in a multi-part series describing what a curriculum for human languages literacy might look like.
Today’s topic was an important concept for me to grasp on my way to becoming interested in languages. So let me start by giving some of my language experience:
When I was in Junior High School, High School and even early college, I found learning a foreign language to be very frustrating (as many others certainly did as well). I was a good student, got good grades and could even get by in Spanish class. But I knew I couldn’t really use the language. Nor did I have immediate opportunities to try out my Spanish. (Actually, there were many opportunities right nearby, but I didn’t realize it and no one encouraged me to seek those opportunities out.) My overwhelming sense about languages was that they were highly arbitrary, maybe even mostly arbitrary. I figured you pretty much had to memorize all the random words and haphazard grammar. And as for the sounds, I had no idea how someone could make the correct sounds, unless they were, er, you know, a native speaker. Of course, someone might be able to speak a second language well if they had a phenomenally good ear and an accompanying talent. Not being good at memorization and not having a good ear, I resigned myself to the fact that I just wasn’t one of the people who was going to be good at languages. I can partly blame the language teaching method for this perspective. But even more basic than that, I just wasn’t grasping how analyzable and learnable languages were. (Please note that I’m not saying here that learning languages is necessarily easy, just that learning them is actually possible!)
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There was a time (at least in the United States) when educators thought that learning a second language could slow down a child’s cognitive development, possibly permanently. While it is true that children who grow up bilingual sometimes take longer to become proficient in communication (in two languages!), the delay doesn’t last long. Researchers now recognize there are many mental benefits to being bilingual.
