Relax everyone speaks english..

Everyone in the world is learning to speak english, looks like the fall of babel couldnt keep us down. There is just one problem. Not incoroporating foreign language in our curriculm is leaving american students behind by more than what is considered to be a long shot. A 2006 British study found 450 million native English speakers around the world. But as many as a billion people, mostly from China and India, were learning English as their second language. California Standards testing results show Asian students score higher in both English and math than all other students—including white students.and some estimates say there are more English speakers in China than the entire adult population of the United States.





The capabilities of bilingual educated children are continuing to amaze me. I actually have a friend in germany who i met during my senoir year of high school who at the time was an exchange student who by the age of 17 had already become fluent in German, Arabic, and most important English. I was blown away by her ability to learn and communicate effectivley in 2 languages , so imagine my surprize when I found that she also spoke arabic. At the time i never thought that achieveing fluency in another language was important, It was more like a really neat magic trick that only she was capable of performing.



That was nearly ten years ago. Through the use of facebook and also her returning to the states a few time we have been able to keep in touch. It's no surprize to me that she has now begun to master the spanish language and also has spent nearly 4 years working on the Chinese language. When i learned of her new found abilities and languages and thought of my own strugles with learning spanish, I began to feel as if I had been cheated in some way. Why was it so easy for her to pick up an entire language, learn it speak it and move on? It was simply something that she had been taught was important from the time she was young.

In Europe there are so many different languages spoken so its very important for children to become bilingual at an early age. Why couldn't our schools implement foreign language? I guess if everyone else is learning our language why learn theirs? I dont know what was going on in the minds of the people who are appointed to educate the youth of america, but someone should have told them that these bilingual children would become capable and prepared simply by breaking down conventional methods of thinking that are derived from learning and speaking only one language.