Unrealized Linguistic Potential

By Geoffrey Nunberg

FBI director Robert Mueller exposed one of the most glaring deficiencies in U.S. in­telligence capabilities when he made a public appeal for translators of Arabic, Farsi and Pashto, which some people took as the occasion to criticize foreign-language programs in American schools and universities. If the war on terrorism awakens some students and school administrators to the importance of lan­guage study, so much the better. But it would be a mistake to lay responsibility for the United States’ lack of strategic language resources chiefly with schools or universities — or to believe they are in a position to rectify the problem.

The United States needs instead to take advan­tage of the resources that the promise of America has brought to our shores — children who are growing up speaking those languages in cities across the country from Brooklyn to San Francisco. The Census Bureau estimates that 40,000 Afghans are living in America, the majority of them ethnic Pashtuns, and others put the figures several times higher.

America’s lack of linguistic expertise is not a new problem — nor one that will go away soon. The FBI has acknowledged that it could have had warn­ings of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing from intercepted tapes and notebooks in Arabic if it had had the resources to translate them. Similarly, the United States could have known ahead of time about the 1998 nuclear tests in India and Pakistan if it had been able to translate information in its pos­session.

Foreign-language study in the United States is not suffering from nearly such a dramatic decline as some have suggested. True, the proportion of col­lege students studying languages has dropped over recent decades, but that’s largely because most of the growth in college enrollment has been in new programs that tend to give the traditional liberal arts curriculum less emphasis than older schools do. At elite universities, in fact, enrollment in language courses is up. At Stanford, it has increased 20 per­cent in the past decade.

What’s more, a 1997 study by the Center for Ap­plied Linguistics in Washington showed that the number of both public and private high schools of­fering foreign languages had held steady since 1987, and that the number of elementary schools offering languages had increased from 22 to 31 percent. Even more impressively, there has been a 50 per­cent increase in the number of elementary schools offering intensive or immersion programs aimed at developing true fluency in foreign languages. That is a sign that Americans are finally starting to learn what Europeans have known for a long time — that language mastery has to come early in life. But whether in Europe or America, the fact remains that most children learn languages that are gener­ally useful for trade and culture, such as Spanish or German — not for foreign policy, such as Dari and Pashto.

While universities must play the central role in developing the foreign-area specialists that national security requires, it is unrealistic to expect them to shoulder most of the burden of developing the lin­guistic resources that America needs, whether for national security or for the more pedestrian pur­poses of trade and international politics. Programs in languages such as Arabic are expensive and diffi­cult to establish. Most strategic languages can be learned only at specialized institutions such as the Defense Language Training Institute in Monterey, California, or through programs designed by orga­nizations such as the Center for Applied Linguistics.

What was really sad about the FBI’s appeal for Arabic and Pashto translators is that, of all coun­tries, the United States is not short of speakers of those languages, both in the form of recent immi­grants and, more importantly, their bilingual chil­dren, who satisfy the citizenship and residency re­quirements that national security demands of its language experts.

In fact, given the broad linguistic backgrounds of American immigrants (the Department of Educa­tion estimates that more than 100 languages are spoken by students in the Fairfax County, Virginia, public schools alone), we ought to be in a unique position to deal with any linguistic challenges that world events might throw our way. Albanian, Tagalog, Somali, Uzbek, Tamil — whatever the language of the next hot spot, we will have thousands of speakers of it in our own backyard.

That linguistic competence wouldn’t be lost to Americans if they instituted a national heritage language program aimed at helping the children of im­migrants maintain and develop their fluency and lit­eracy in their native tongues. Such a program could make use of resources ranging from Internet dis­cussion groups to summer programs. It would help students develop knowledge of technical and busi­ness language, not simply the domestic vocabulary they use at home. And in communities of immi­grants, the best model would be two-way immer­sion programs in elementary schools, like those al­ready established for languages such as Mandarin, Japanese and Russian.

The principle here is no different from what the Bush administration has been arguing in its energy policy: It’s a lot easier to cultivate existing resources than to develop new ones. But that approach would require a reversal in American attitudes toward bilingualism — a change from the concerted effort of recent years to eliminate bilingual education programs, even those aimed at easing the transition to English.

The English-only movement has encouraged the belief that assimilation necessarily involves giving up a foreign tongue. It leaves the country in an odd position: Children of immigrants are encouraged to become monolingual, but then Americans lament when there’s no one available to translate the very languages these students grew up speaking.

Nations such as Belgium, Switzerland, Finland and even Australia have made the maintenance of native languages an educational priority without hampering students’ mastery of their official na­tional languages. And American ethnic and reli­gious minorities have long supported private pro­grams aimed at making children fluent in languages such as Chinese and Hebrew without inhibiting their assimilation to English, or for that matter, their unqualified patriotism.

Whatever progress is made in encouraging na­tive English speakers to learn foreign languages, America will never reach the levels of multilingual proficiency that are routine in regions like northern Europe — or provide in schools the opportunity to learn languages that the security agencies now re­quire. To many Americans, the worldwide domi­nance of English makes foreign-language skills seem a luxury rather than a necessity here. But that’s all the more reason to help the children of immigrants maintain their parents’ languages. If Sept. 11 has taught us anything, it’s that those skills are too important to be sacrificed in the name of cul­tural uniformity.

Geoffrey Nunberg is a scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, consulting professor of lin­guistics at Stanford University and author most re­cently of “The Way We Talk Now.” He contributed this comment to The Washington Post.

III. Лексические упражнения

1. Переведите на русский язык сочетания существительного language с некоторыми существительными:

language study, mastery, programs, resources, skills, experts, courses.

2.Переведите на русский язык предложения, в которых слова language и tongue являются частичными синонимами:

That linguistic competence wouldn’t be lost to Americans if they instituted a national heritage language program aimed at helping the children of im­migrants maintain and develop their fluency and lit­eracy in their native tongues.

It would help students develop knowledge of technical and busi­ness language, not simply the domestic vocabulary they use at home. The English-only movement has encouraged the belief that assimilation necessarily involves giving up a foreign tongue.

Nations such as Belgium, Switzerland, Finland and even Australia have made the maintenance of native languages as educational priority without hampering students’ mastery of their official national languages.

3. Переведите на русский язык предложения со словом background. Обратите внимание на многозначность этого слова:

Each step in the history of our country had different background.

Historical background contributes much to the plots of Valter Scott’s novels.

Lord Henry took a great interest in Dorian Grey’s social background.

At the background of the picture visitors can see a woman dancing.

5. Переведите на русский язык сочетания существительного education с некоторыми прилагательными:

bilingual

monolingual education

multilingual

Дата добавления: 2015-08-20