Just out of interest, to all the Americans reading this:
How large a percentage of high school students learn a new language at high school (in the US) and what is their typical level (spoken and written) after high school (abysmal - poor - average - good - fluent). I could for instance imagine that Spanish would be interesting when you're close to the Mexican border or French when you're close to Quebec or some other language that you're just interested in. I do understand that additional languages aren't that interesting when you're living in a large single language region like the US. But I'm curious how high school students approach this.
Well, I tried a quick Google search to see if I could find an answer to your question about percentages, however I was not successful
. I think a lot of high school and college students are expected to study foreign language--certainly they are here in Colorado. But the level of ability that results may not be very high without something more.
As I recall I had to start taking a foreign language in junior high school; I think it was in 7th grade. Junior high school, as it then was in Colorado, included the seventh through the ninth grades (in our Kindergarten-12th grade system). I started in French but switched to Spanish pretty quickly. I took Spanish all the way through high school, then was able to test out of one year of the foreign language requirement at the state university I attended (in another state). The requirement was for two years of foreign language education, so I still had to take one more year. So all in all I had about 7 years of Spanish in school. But somewhere along the line in my first two years in college, I decided that A) I really wanted to study abroad, and B) I wanted to study in a primarily Spanish-speaking country, because I didn't feel like I could really use the language effectively despite all those years studying it. So I studied for a semester in (as it turned out) an area of Spain not frequented much by tourists. Our classes were taught in Spanish (though they were separate from the classes the native Spanish students were taking), and as far as I could tell, barely anyone in the small city in which I lived spoke English, other than the professor who was the liaison for our program. It was a little rough communicating with my host family for the first couple of weeks, but it was amazing how rapidly my understanding progressed. I had one professor--for a linguistics class-- who spoke so fast that at first I thought I would have to drop her class. But within one month, I understood most of what she was saying, and by the end of two months, it was rare for me to not understand something that she said. My ability to say what I wanted to say when I wanted to say it-- what I understand is called "active vocabulary"-- improved more gradually, but still faster than it had in the classroom in the United States. I learned a lot about grammar in the US, and it was good to have that foundation, however, it's the time I spent in Spain that I credit for catapulting (<---catapults; the token Civ connection in this post
) my ability to
use Spanish effectively forward in a big way.
The next year, I studied for a semester in Quito, Ecuador. The language adjustment was much easier that time, having had the immersion experience in Spain. And in Ecuador, I took a couple of classes taught in Spanish alongside Ecuadorian students.
For a couple of years, I taught Spanish to adults part-time at a continuing education center in the city I live in. And for one school year, I taught it to children in levels from preschool through grade 6 at a small private school. I haven't studied the theory of education, however, my experience learning and teaching Spanish has led me to believe that we Americans could focus less on trying to translate or compare everything in a foreign language--words, expressions, rules of the language--into/to English. Trying to do so doesn't really work anyway. It seems to me that we tend to focus too much on trying to make everything familiar to us, and on minimizing "mistakes"-- a perfectionistic approach that might protect some people's feelings if they're sensitive about making mistakes, but in my case, and I think in the case of others as well, that doesn't help us to have the confidence to go out and speak imperfectly and learn how the language is used outside of the classroom. Speaking of which, there are many people in the metro area I live in who speak Spanish as their first language, and yet it seems to me like we almost live in different worlds-- because English dominates in so many areas of public life here.
So I probably had a "good" theoretical foundation but "poor" actual usage ability until I had lived in Spain for a few weeks. I'm very grateful to have had the chance to improve my ability/fluency in a big way.
![[party]](/images/smilies/partytime.gif "Party [party]")
English is the mandatory language on Civilization Fanatics Center! 
There is a language called Castilian .... calling Castilian Spanish is like saying that the people of the United Kingdom speak UnitedKingdomiam 
