WHY FOREIGN LANGUAGES ARE RELEVANT AGAIN
Published: January 4, 1987
(Page 4 of 4)
To alleviate its shortage, New York City has recruited teachers in Spain, and also agreed to an arrangement in which the Government of Greece supplied and paid the salary of a teacher of Greek. But the problem is nationwide: Mr. Brannon said some school districts in Virginia had offered bonuses of $2,000 to recruit teachers of German, and in Oregon, one district unable to find teachers for its new Chinese program went all the way to China to hire an instructor.
''I'm under pressure from the Governor's office to start programs in Chinese and Japanese,'' said Walter Bartz, who supervises language programs for Indiana. ''A lot of schools would like to do that, but they can't find the needed certified teachers.''
For some countries that situation has offered new opportunities to win American friends, extend their cultural influence and shore up the position of their language in a volatile market. West Germany has sent teachers and supervisors to several states, but the most active country appears to be Belgium, which supplied more than 600 teachers of French to schools in Louisiana, Wisconsin and Ohio.
''We are receiving more inquiries than ever,'' said Eliane Levaque, who directs the Belgian program from Baton Rouge, La. ''American schools feel a certain pride in getting a foreigner to teach his native language, and in Belgium we have a surplus of teachers. So instead of putting them on the unemployment lines we select the best of them and send them over here.''
''North America and Europe are drifting apart, and we must do everything to bring them back together,'' said Dr. Heinrich Baumhoff, education counselor at the West German Embassy. ''This type of program does away with stereotypes and cliches, and because of bad memories of two World Wars and the Nazi regime, we Germans have to do more in that respect than some others.''
School boards have generally welcomed these imported teachers. But Mr. Edwards also cautioned that ''just because you can speak the language doesn't mean you can teach it, and even if you can, you must take into account that the German or Belgian education system is very different from the American.''
At the same time, many of the same educators admit to concerns about the language skills of American teachers. Those questions have been heightened by the move toward more rigorous certification requirements, as part of the overall national drive for higher standards, now being tested in Texas by its state education department and the American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages. A KEY PART of the certification process being developed in Texas involves a test of oral proficiency, a feature that is also expected to appear elsewhere. In order to sharpen their speaking skills, teachers are being encouraged, when money can be pried loose from school boards, to enroll in summer language institutes and to travel in countries where their language is spoken.
But administrators appear to have mixed feelings about readiness-for-certification programs and the new demands being placed on teachers. ''Our teachers will need to beef up their own language skills if we are going to have long sequences of language study, so we are already starting in on that,'' said Gerard Toussaint, North Carolina's language supervisor. On the other hand, the director of language programs in one Western state said, ''If we put in an oral-proficiency requirement, we'd lose half the teachers in my state.''
Among educators,, however, the biggest fear is of what Mr. Brod called ''unrealistic expectations.'' Mindful of the bitter memories many adult Americans feel at their inability to master a language and aware that they are competing with profit-oriented programs that typically promise prospective students to be able to ''Speak Spanish Like a Diplomat'' almost overnight, foreign-language advocates have been careful not to promise too much too soon.
''I'm worried that there will be a tendency toward quick fixes, things like six-month intensive language institutes,'' Mr. Edwards said. ''There's a lot of hype about what can be achieved and how fast, and students get angry when after two years they are not proficient in the language.''
In fact, Ms. Hayden said, the resurgence of interest in languages should be seen as ''a long-term investment. We don't expect a building to be built in a day. It takes a lot of time, effort and money to dig and lay a foundation. Americans are not born lacking certain chromosomes that enable them to learn foreign languages. We just haven't tried, up to now, in the same way that other countries have. I hope this time will be different.''
Photo of English-speaking first-grader studying Spanish (NYT/Steve Jennings)