Is the high school language curriculum effective?

Samo students are lucky enough to be offered a multitude of different languages, at a variety of different levels. Spanish classes go up to level 6 AP, Japanese goes up to 5 AP, Latin goes up to 5 HP and the others are offered up to level four, which is more than most schools can say. However, students are only in high school for four years, meaning a lot of them never reach those rigorous levels. The question we’re left with is if teenagers can really be fluent in a language after four years of classes. At Samo, the answer is usually no.  Research has shown that fluency in a language depends on three factors: the attitude of the learner, the time taken to learn and the attentiveness of the learner towards the language. Because both Samo and universities require a two-year language class minimum, all students take a language as their elective for at least half of their high school career if they are looking to graduate, let alone get accepted to their desired college. This means many students take these classes because they are forced to, not because they are interested in the foreign language. This is extremely saddening in our increasingly multi-lingual world.  At Samo, foreign language teachers often focus on textbook curriculum, such as fill-in-the-blanks to practice vocabulary and audio-workbook activities to test listening and understanding. While these are appropriate for teenaged learning, it is not enough to reach complete fluency. For homework, students are assigned workbook pages that take less than 20 minutes, and are easily found online to copy, if they’re not copied from peers first. Because students at Samo also take rigorous classes in other subjects, their time is usually spent on those. 10 minute workbook pages are the last thing on students’ agendas when they have essays to write and AP exams to study for. Foreign language classes are usually forgotten in the sea of homework and stress, restricting students from really absorbing the material.  The U.S. Foreign Service Institute (FSI) claims that with proper attentiveness, a good attitude and 10 hours of studying a day, it will take 48 days to learn a language at level two fluency. According to the FSI, level two is “limited working proficiency,” meaning the learner is able to understand routine social demands and limited work requirements. This does not satisfy the meaning of “fluent” that comes to mind when thinking of the word. In addition, students spend one and a half hours--at most--on their language a day, including class time and homework. This means it will take roughly 320 days to reach level two fluency. This includes weekends and breaks, when students are surely not studying their language textbooks. So, it will take good students almost two school years to reach “limited working proficiency,” which does not include writing well, having proper grammatical structure or the ability to participate in formal conversation.  It is still very possible for teenagers to learn a language fluently if they have enough interest. Sitting in a classroom, however, is not the way to do it. Kaela Kleinman (’21) was enrolled in Spanish 2 before moving to Sevilla, Spain through an exchange program. She admits she spoke little to no Spanish before she left, but can now keep up with conversation and even attends normal Spanish-speaking classes with her peers in Sevilla.  “I’m constantly speaking Spanish, because the only person who speaks English is my Englishteacher. It’s 100 percent helping me because I have no choice but to constantly speak Spanish,” Kleinman said.  Ultimately, the only way to truly become a fluent speaker is to fully immerse yourself in the language and culture.