When I first walked into Escondido as a kindergartener participating in the dual-immersion program, the teacher greeted me — as I expected — but in Spanish.
Despite speaking mainly English at home, I began to feel comfortable using Spanish with regularity in everyday life after just a few months of practice. Of course, it was a 5-year-old’s second language, and therefore far from perfect, but I could hold a conversation pretty darn well in this new language.
A year later, I transferred to Ohlone, joining the English program. Over the years, my Spanish proficiency slowly declined without the regular exposure I had previously benefited from. Still, when it came time to enter language classes in middle school, I had a solid foundation. I quickly picked Spanish back up and have since continued learning and improving my fluency.
That’s the cool thing about learning a new language when you’re young: developing brains can pick up multiple languages at a remarkably fast pace. It can feel like wielding a newfound power that opens up doors to new worlds, experiences, and relationships.
I now volunteer at Project READ in Redwood City every week, where I tutor low-income kids in reading and writing. In Redwood City, hearing Spanish is almost as common as hearing English. About 16% of the city’s residents are primarily Spanish speaking. When I’m working with people who are much more comfortable speaking Spanish, it’s so rewarding to meet them where they are, by speaking with them in their native language. Overwhelmingly, I’ve found that even if my Spanish isn’t always perfect, people are happy to find that they can express themselves clearly and comfortably with me, and are grateful that I am doing my best to try to understand and connect with them.
The district’s language immersion programs are an incredible opportunity for students to gain fluency in another language. They begin in kindergarten: in Spanish at Escondido and in Mandarin at Ohlone. As a participant in the program, your education is entirely in that language through 5th grade. The goal is to help students reach bilingual fluency, and the programs have proven to be wildly successful. A study of the program by Stanford researchers found that when compared with high school students taking AP Mandarin on standardized tests, the immersion kids in fifth grade scored the same or above the high schoolers.
However, these immersion programs only reach a small portion of students in the district— only two classes per grade cluster at Ohlone, and two classes per grade level at Escondido, have access to the program. Otherwise, the earliest students can start a language is in seventh grade.
While people are capable of acquiring a new language quickly until age 18, learning one after the age of 10 makes it nearly impossible to gain native-level fluency. In other words, it’s much more challenging for a 12-year old seventh grader to pick up a new language than it would be for a kindergartener. As students get into high school, a heavy focus on meeting graduation requirements and taking challenging STEM classes emerges, language classes are often the first to be dropped. Learning another language earlier in life would allow students to clear up space in their schedules and spend more time exploring other areas that they’re passionate about. If languages were included earlier, students could start high school in more advanced language classes, and really focus on their proficiency throughout high school, or even consider learning a third language. But when required language classes become extra tasks to check off on top of already crammed schedules, I can understand how it becomes frustrating.
By the time you get to high school, most students’ schedules are completely filled up with school, extracurriculars, and other commitments. It’s not the ideal conditions in which to learn a new language, which takes time, patience, immersion, and consistency to reach mastery. When you’re only doing it for a graduation requirement, or when you don’t have a solid foundation yet, it can feel hard to stay motivated, which I think is a big part of why some kids only complete the bare minimum in order to graduate.
However, when it’s built into your daily life from a young age, learning a new language becomes automatic as you acquire words and grammar in a natural environment. If you’re immersed in it in an authentic way, it is rewarding, and if you build the skills at a young age, you will be able to further challenge yourself in a second language once you get to high school. My daily interactions with the students and families from Project READ and my ability to communicate with people when I am in communities where Spanish is the predominant langauge spoken reminds me how thankful I am that I put all of that hard work into my Spanish classes. You learn a language to be able to connect with people who are different from you, and learning it in a natural environment allows you to enjoy it more and therefore learn faster.
Through immersing yourself in a language you’re not as comfortable with, you’re exposed to that frustration of not being completely understood, you can build empathy for those who experience it every single day. My experiences of being a language learner has provided a window into the experiences of many immigrants in this country who are trying to navigate systems in a language they don’t fully understand.
Additionally, being comfortable in more than one language can open up opportunities — most notably, living and working in another country. The United States is a rare example of an advanced monolingual society — in Europe, the majority of people speak more than one language, which is a stark contrast to the 20% of Americans who are bilingual. Maybe you’ve heard the joke: what do you call someone who speaks 3 languages? (Trilingual). What do you call someone who speaks two languages? (Bilingual.) What do you call someone who speaks one language? (American). In Europe, according to the Pew Research Center, where there are much higher levels of bilingualism, almost every country requires kids as young as six to learn a foreign language, and 73% of elementary school students learn a second language in the classroom.
Given the rich cultural and ethnic diversity that exists in the US, language learning is especially important because it fosters multicultural connections. In order to facilitate life-long language mastery, which opens up opportunities and lends its hand to helping students form cross-cultural connections, the district should implement a more widespread path to early language fluency. By helping kids get a head start on learning languages from a young age, they will be more likely to continue to pursue learning that language at higher levels. If you invest time and energy in learning something as a young child—when mistakes and failures aren’t tracked and recorded the way they are on transcripts in high school—you will value the skill more, enjoy it more, and it won’t turn into simply another task to check off your list.
The district could model a language-learning program after the music program, which begins in elementary school, yet still allows students to have some agency in the process. If language learning were incorporated into school –- even for just thirty minutes a day — students would see significant benefits, and it would start them on a trajectory toward language fluency. Students could work with specific language teachers, and have a degree of choice about which languages they want to learn. Although there would probably be a need to have fewer options (limiting them to Spanish, Mandarin, and French might be a good set of language offerings to begin with, due to the popularity of those languages in high school), if students wanted to transition to other languages in middle or high school, that option would still be there. Once you have a foundation in a language, it’s much easier to stay motivated to continue learning it, and even if you decide to switch to a different language later in your life, learning one language makes learning other languages much easier.
It may take time out of the normal school day, but its returns are worth the investment. The New American Economy reported that the demand for bilingual workers doubled between 2010 and 2015, and these numbers will keep growing. Research has shown that individuals fluent in multiple languages have up to thirty-five percent greater job prospects because they are better equipped to bridge cultural divides and communicate effectively. Bilingual employees earn, on average, between 5 – 20% more than their monolingual counterparts.
It is the responsibility of the district to prepare its students to be both understanding and successful citizens in our increasingly interconnected and globalized world, and in this day and age, that involves helping students master multiple languages.
Regular exposure to a second language from a young age, even if it isn’t the only language a child hears, would make it easier for students to reach higher levels of bilingual fluency, avoid burnout, and enjoy the process of learning languages. In the end, schools have an opportunity to inspire, equip, and empower young people to grow into adults who value communication as a powerful tool to build bridges between cultures and communities.
