EOC A Practice attempt 1

From “America’s Lacking Language Skills”
By Amelia Friedman (The Atlantic, May 10, 2015)

​Educators from across the country gathered in Washington, D.C., this past Thursday to lobby in the interest of world languages. It was Language Advocacy Day, an annual event on Capitol Hill that is aimed at garnering more federal support for language education. . . .

Each year as national budget priorities are determined, language education is losing out—cuts have been made to funding for such instruction, including Title VI grants and the Foreign Language Assistance Program. And the number of language enrollments in higher education in the U.S. declined1 by more than 111,000 spots between 2009 and 2013—the first drop since 1995. Translation? Only 7 percent of college students in America are enrolled in a language course.

Another challenge emerges when looking at the languages these students are learning, too. In 2013, roughly 198,000 U.S. college students2 were taking a French course; just 64, on the other hand, were studying Bengali. Yet, globally, 193 million people speak Bengali, while 75 million speak French. In fact, Arne Duncan, the U.S. education secretary, noted back in 2010 that the vast majority—95 percent—of all language enrollments were in a European language. This is just one indicator demonstrating the shortcomings and inequalities in language education today. . . .

Less than 1 percent3 of American adults today are proficient in a foreign language that they studied in a U.S. classroom. That’s noteworthy considering that in 2008 almost all high schools in the country—93 percent—offered foreign languages, according to a national survey.4 In many cases, as Richard Brecht, who oversees the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Study of Language, said on Thursday: “It isn’t that people don’t think language education important. It’s that they don’t think it’s possible.”

Language proficiency is just as hard to build as it is to maintain. But the same could be said even about core subjects, such as math. . . . And knowing a foreign language is an undoubtedly practical skill: According to Mohamed Abdel-Kader, the deputy leading the Department of Education’s language-education arm, one in five jobs are tied to international trade. Meanwhile, the Joint National Committee for Languages reports that the language industry—which includes companies that provide language services and materials—employs more than 200,000 Americans. These employees earn an annual median wage of $80,000.

Kirsten Brecht-Baker, the founder of Global Professional Search, recently told me about what she calls “the global war for talent.” Americans, she said, are in danger of needing to import human capital because insufficient time or dollars are being invested in language education domestically. “It can’t just be about specialization [in engineering or medicine or technology] anymore,” she said. “They have to communicate in the language.”

The Joint National Committee for Languages advocates for integrating language education with subjects ranging from engineering to political science—anything, really. “Languages are not a side dish that’s extra, but it’s a side dish that complements other skills,” [the language policy-analyst Rachel] Hanson said. “You can use it to augment and fortify other skills that you have, and expand the application of these skills.” But students, especially those in college, are often discouraged from language courses or studying abroad because of stringent requirements in another subject matter.

But perhaps educational institutions can address this challenge by integrating language into their other programs. One solution cited by advocates is dual-language instruction, in which a variety of subjects are taught in two languages, thereby eliminating the need to hire a separate language instructor. . . . Bill Rivers, one of the country’s most prominent language lobbyists, points to significant evidence that students in dual-language programs outperform their peers in reading and math by fourth grade—regardless of their race or socioeconomic status. And advocates say dual-language programs are cost-effective because they typically don’t require extra materials for the language instruction; a science textbook, for example, would simply be published in the target language. That means districts buy the same number of materials as they would without the language element. The same goes for the number of teachers needed—though those teachers need to be bilingual as well. . . .

Today, schools are having a hard enough time finding instructors in traditionally taught languages. In fact, the average proficiency of language teachers is below that needed by the military,5 Hanson said. But efforts to recruit qualified teachers to address the nation’s language deficit often face the additional obstacle of developing programs focusing on less-traditional languages. The list of languages designated by the federal government as “critical” include ones that many Americans have probably never even heard of before. There are more people in the world who speak Javanese than there are those to speak German, for example, and more who speak Lahnda than who speak French.

The country has faced shortcomings in language education for at least the past several years. Enrollments have been persistently low, as have proficiency levels; the same goes for non-Western language offerings. And with English as a lingua franca of trade and international politics, bilingualism has become less and less of a priority. True, many people speak English proficiently. But 19 million Americans and billions of people globally do not.

“It’s not a nice-to-have,” Rivers said. “Languages are a need-to-have.”

From The Atlantic. © 2015 The Atlantic Monthly Group, LLC. All rights reserved. Used under license.

 

1: David Goldberg, Dennis Looney, and Natalia Lusin, “Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education,” Modern Language Association, Feb. 2015.
2: Modern Language Association, “Language Enrollment Database, 1958-2016.”
3: Suzie Lechtenberg “Is Learning a Foreign Language Really Worth It?” Freakonomics, March 6, 2014.
4: MustGo Travel, “Languages in the US Educational System”, n.d.
5: Eileen Glisan, Elvira Swender, and Eric Surface, “Oral Proficiency Standards and Foreign Language Teacher Candidates: Current Findings and Future Research Directions,” Foreign Language Annals 46 (2013), 264-289.
6: National Security Education Program, “Critical Languages”, n.d.
7: Jill Wilson, “Investing in English Skills: The Limited English Proficient Workforce in U.S. Metropolitan Areas,” The Brookings Institution, September 24, 2014.

Identify the author’s argument, main idea, or thesis. (3 points)

Explain the author's line of reasoning by identifying the claims used to build the argument and the connections between them. (3 points)

Evaluate the effectiveness of the evidence that author uses to support the claims made in the argument.