Mesaĝoj: 25
Lingvo: English
T0dd (Montri la profilon) 2007-aprilo-06 01:41:14
erinja:Support for foreign language instruction in the US is very weak anyway. Most school students resent every minute they have to spend in language classes, and manage to graduate with incredibly little knowledge. I know this because the university where I teach adminsters simple placement tests to incoming freshmen. Most of those who have had two or three years of foreign language in high school barely manage to score above the raw beginner level. Even after two or three semesters of required language study, the majority still do not achieve an intermediate level of proficiency. Given a choice, most would not study any language, ever. Depressing but true. They tend to think that everyone in the world worth talking to speaks English.
Unfortunately I think a lot of parents would consider this useless, and I can't imagine a lot of parental support for "wasting time" teaching Esperanto when you could be teaching another European language instead. There are many, many research studies showing the value of teaching Esperanto as a gateway to other languages, but people often use emotion rather than logic when making decisions like this.
For 20 years, I've found excuses to mention Esperanto in my classes, and to impart bits of information about it. Not once has any student come to me to learn more.
erinja (Montri la profilon) 2007-aprilo-06 01:54:54
T0dd:Support for foreign language instruction in the US is very weak anyway.It's a really disappointing aspect of our culture, in general. Someone at work (an American speaker of German and Japanese) was just telling me today how shocking it is that in the US, you can be considered a very well-educated person without having even basic conversational proficiency in a foreign language. I've always been astounded at how many people could get through six or more years of studying a language and still barely speak it. Not that I should be so shocked, since I took 4 years of Latin and don't really speak it, but at least I could read and translate it!
Thehouse (Montri la profilon) 2007-aprilo-06 02:17:10
Although I do ironically think that English became such an important business and scientific language partly because Americans as a whole so stubbornly refused to learn other languages
mccambjd (Montri la profilon) 2007-aprilo-06 03:10:12
Thehouse:Although I do ironically think that English became such an important business and scientific language partly because Americans as a whole so stubbornly refused to learn other languagesOh, don't give us all the blame, the English were there first!
We are victims of geography and our own success--if we weren't separated by two oceans from our major trading partners and if English weren't the main language for business and science, more Americans would see the value of a 2nd (or 3rd) language...
erinja (Montri la profilon) 2007-aprilo-06 13:17:00
mccambjd:We are victims of geography and our own success--if we weren't separated by two oceans from our major trading partners and if English weren't the main language for business and science, more Americans would see the value of a 2nd (or 3rd) language...Plus you can be a reasonably well-travelled American, travelling extensively across most of a continent (North America) and never needing more than English. I know many, many people who have never left the US and Canada, even though they have travelled a lot. It would be much more difficult for a European to go through life like that. It would be like spending your entire life never leaving California, or never leaving Pennsylvania. Hard to imagine! (though I suspect such people exist in Europe, and I have heard of Americans who have never left their home state)