IHE: Foreign Language Enrollment Declines 16% Since 2016

[apl68]

I don't know to what extent this is all just the result of the decay of efforts at bilingualism, though. It may be that it was required early on, then provincial governments decided it wasn't worth their energy. Seems like a silly way to implement a national goal, though.

To what extent do Anglophone Canadians (including school administrators) feel like this is a mandate from Francophone Quebeckes that wasn't motivated by a sense of building national fraternité? That could generate a reduced motivation that doesn't result in bilingualism, or even "biliteracy".

I would suspect that it's widely resented by people who figure that, if they're in the majority nationwide, it's the linguistic minority ought to be expected to bear the burden of bilingualism.  That's what most people who don't have a particular interest in languages or don't live in an environment that makes knowing more than one language a necessity think about learning another language--it's a burden they'd just as soon do without.

That's kind of a sad attitude.  In principle students would benefit by learning other languages, and the learning about other cultures that tends to go with that.  I've not kept up my Spanish to be fluent (I've always been held back by a perfectionism that made me too self-conscious a speaker to feel like practicing it until I got better), but I still feel that I benefited a great deal from having studied it back in high school and college. 

It's like so much of education.  One only really gets the benefits if one wants them.  Students who don't truly have an interest in learning, who aren't at least open to studying a variety of fields, who just want to do the minimum they can get by with to get a piece of paper that entitles them to a job of some kind, end up squandering their opportunities.  If they're forced to learn about other languages and cultures, they only end up resenting it.  So now we have a climate where fewer and fewer educational opportunities are offered, and there's less variety of opportunities available, even for those who might still want them.

[marshwiggle]

It is a shame. There was a good article in The Conversation yesterday about how this is a problem for US national security.

I know, right?  This is one humanities field that has an argument for its utility that one would think would be enough to appeal to the crude utilitarianism that now dominates our higher ed.  But the students don't seem to perceive its utility, and if they aren't demanding the classes then the colleges find it easy to cut the programs.

I would actually argue that learning a language is actually one of the few humanities-based "hard" skills, since it is easy to test, and takes a long time and lots of effort to acquire. It should be possible to study how many jobs in all kinds of sectors are only open to people who speak specific foreign languages.

[dismalist]

That Korean number is easily explained by the fact that the Korean-American population grew by one third since 2015. The language is useful in the Korean diaspora and at home with family.

As for the rest, the usefulness of a language is indeed mostly determined by how many people speak it. And here we must realize that "everybody" speaks English. Here is a map giving the share in European countries

Share of English speakers

In the late 19th century there were three specialized linguae francae -- French for diplomacy, German for science, and English for commerce. Nowadays there is only English for everything.

[Parasaurolophus]

I don't know to what extent this is all just the result of the decay of efforts at bilingualism, though. It may be that it was required early on, then provincial governments decided it wasn't worth their energy. Seems like a silly way to implement a national goal, though.

To what extent do Anglophone Canadians (including school administrators) feel like this is a mandate from Francophone Quebeckes that wasn't motivated by a sense of building national fraternité? That could generate a reduced motivation that doesn't result in bilingualism, or even "biliteracy".

I'm not super well-informed on this topic (am I on any topic? Well, less so on this one!), but my sense is that it's been perceived as a mandate from the federal government, and that's the problem. Some provinces are quite hostile to the federal government (including Québec, but not on this issue, obviously), and that's enough to sink any number of plans. (Manitoba, for instance, is home to the third-largest Francophone minority in the country, but until 1985 it banned its legislature and courts from using French. It only stopped because of a Supreme Court ruling.) There's plenty of Québec-bashing around, but it's got more to do with the perception of preferential treatment from the federal government than with official languages.

But also, there was an urgency about it in 1969, following the Official Languages Act, and in the '80s and '90s. But not any more.

I would suspect that it's widely resented by people who figure that, if they're in the majority nationwide, it's the linguistic minority ought to be expected to bear the burden of bilingualism.  That's what most people who don't have a particular interest in languages or don't live in an environment that makes knowing more than one language a necessity think about learning another language--it's a burden they'd just as soon do without.

Yeah, resentment is high. Or, it used to be, when I was a kid in the '90s and early aughts. I might be old and out of touch now, but it seems to be at a low ebb nowadays. Support for bilingualism tends to poll high--it's consistently been 70%+ nationally for at least the last twenty years (and I know it was nearly as high as early as the '70s).

The reality, however, is that not a day goes by without somebody misgendering my (really quite simple) name (even when I spell it out or when it's written in front of their eyes) or giving me an entirely different name because they can't believe that a cis man like me would have a girl's name (seriously--not one day. It's exhausting.). Or going bug-eyed at my credit card receipt.

[marshwiggle]

I'm not super well-informed on this topic (am I on any topic? Well, less so on this one!), but my sense is that it's been perceived as a mandate from the federal government, and that's the problem. Some provinces are quite hostile to the federal government (including Québec, but not on this issue, obviously), and that's enough to sink any number of plans.

Actually, the Quebec government is hostile to minority language rights in the province, more so than other provincial governments.

Most people don't know that Quebec was officially bilingual until the 70's, when bilingualism was rejected by the provincial government in favour of making the province officially unilingually French.

[Parasaurolophus]

I'm not super well-informed on this topic (am I on any topic? Well, less so on this one!), but my sense is that it's been perceived as a mandate from the federal government, and that's the problem. Some provinces are quite hostile to the federal government (including Québec, but not on this issue, obviously), and that's enough to sink any number of plans.

Actually, the Quebec government is hostile to minority language rights in the province, more so than other provincial governments.

Most people don't know that Quebec was officially bilingual until the 70's, when bilingualism was rejected by the provincial government in favour of making the province officially unilingually French.

Yes. But 'this issue' refers to learning French in school, not learning English.

[Wahoo Redux]

So now we have a climate where fewer and fewer educational opportunities are offered, and there's less variety of opportunities available, even for those who might still want them.

At one point I opined that the postmodern structure of a liberal arts education, while it could use some updates, wasn't so bad.  The opinion was not meant with great enthusiasm. 

What we had wasn't so bad.  Education is losing its depth.  There are endless plaints on the r/professors subreddit about the ethos and ability of the student body.  Some of this is the perennial "kids these days" attitudes of oldsters, I think, but some of it is the lack of actual intellectualism in education. 

Personally, I am trying to distance myself from academia now that I no longer work there----but this is proving difficult.

It's up to y'all, I guess.

[Hegemony]

A lot of people would say that there's no need to learn Swedish to interact with Swedish people, since every Swede over the age of infancy speaks approximately perfect English.

So for various reasons I started to get involved with Swedish academia, and was invited over for various conferences and workshops. The conferences and workshops were so well run and interesting and lavishly funded (and they paid for me to come), that I thought, "How can I keep getting invited to these? How can I become more involved with Swedish academia?"

All of the events were exclusively in English, and there were academics from all over — Europe, France, Japan, China... So naturally English was the lingua franca.

But I noticed that the people who were invited again and again were people who (though they spoke English at the workshops) also knew Swedish. At coffee and informal dinners they typically transitioned into Swedish with the local academics.

That's when I started learning Swedish.

So I conclude that although English is a great international lingua franca, if you want an edge — in academia, in business, in politics, in diplomacy — you learn and speak the local language. That's a big advantage of language learning even when people say "But they speak English, so why bother?"

The trouble is that most of our students don't care about an edge. Their approach is "What is the least amount of effort I can get away with?"

(Yes, I did learn Swedish, and am still learning. Yes, I did become more involved with Swedish academia.)

[kaysixteen]

Just a wee thought here, wrt declining foreign lang enrollments... obviously one hates to see this, esp as a language teacher, but that said, most college FL profs have at best an ambivalent relationship to requirements for taking FL courses, as, well, if a student really does not want to take a FL, he can be miserable in the class, greatly reluctant, etc., which will more or less make the teacher miserable as well.

[marshwiggle]

Just a wee thought here, wrt declining foreign lang enrollments... obviously one hates to see this, esp as a language teacher, but that said, most college FL profs have at best an ambivalent relationship to requirements for taking FL courses, as, well, if a student really does not want to take a FL, he can be miserable in the class, greatly reluctant, etc., which will more or less make the teacher miserable as well.

This is the problem with required courses in general. The less students see the requirement as fitting into their educational goals, the less favourable they're going to be to taking them, with all of the negative consequences you've mentioned. So engineering students will probably accept math requirements more than history students would, since in the former case it's more obvious why the requirement exists.

The upshot of this is that "requiring" courses to keep up enrollment in some declining discipline is not a good strategy; students will see the requirement as unnecessary and will resent it.

[Sun_Worshiper]

Just a wee thought here, wrt declining foreign lang enrollments... obviously one hates to see this, esp as a language teacher, but that said, most college FL profs have at best an ambivalent relationship to requirements for taking FL courses, as, well, if a student really does not want to take a FL, he can be miserable in the class, greatly reluctant, etc., which will more or less make the teacher miserable as well.

This is the problem with required courses in general. The less students see the requirement as fitting into their educational goals, the less favourable they're going to be to taking them, with all of the negative consequences you've mentioned. So engineering students will probably accept math requirements more than history students would, since in the former case it's more obvious why the requirement exists.

The upshot of this is that "requiring" courses to keep up enrollment in some declining discipline is not a good strategy; students will see the requirement as unnecessary and will resent it.

There is some truth to this. A colleague was just telling me that some of their students in a required class are very vocal about not seeing it as valuable or as something that will enhance their professional goals.

That said, students don't always know what is best for them or for their professional development.

[dismalist]

Just a wee thought here, wrt declining foreign lang enrollments... obviously one hates to see this, esp as a language teacher, but that said, most college FL profs have at best an ambivalent relationship to requirements for taking FL courses, as, well, if a student really does not want to take a FL, he can be miserable in the class, greatly reluctant, etc., which will more or less make the teacher miserable as well.

This is the problem with required courses in general. The less students see the requirement as fitting into their educational goals, the less favourable they're going to be to taking them, with all of the negative consequences you've mentioned. So engineering students will probably accept math requirements more than history students would, since in the former case it's more obvious why the requirement exists.

The upshot of this is that "requiring" courses to keep up enrollment in some declining discipline is not a good strategy; students will see the requirement as unnecessary and will resent it.

There is some truth to this. A colleague was just telling me that some of their students in a required class are very vocal about not seeing it as valuable or as something that will enhance their professional goals.

That said, students don't always know what is best for them or for their professional development.

But we do, right? :-)

[Sun_Worshiper]

Just a wee thought here, wrt declining foreign lang enrollments... obviously one hates to see this, esp as a language teacher, but that said, most college FL profs have at best an ambivalent relationship to requirements for taking FL courses, as, well, if a student really does not want to take a FL, he can be miserable in the class, greatly reluctant, etc., which will more or less make the teacher miserable as well.

This is the problem with required courses in general. The less students see the requirement as fitting into their educational goals, the less favourable they're going to be to taking them, with all of the negative consequences you've mentioned. So engineering students will probably accept math requirements more than history students would, since in the former case it's more obvious why the requirement exists.

The upshot of this is that "requiring" courses to keep up enrollment in some declining discipline is not a good strategy; students will see the requirement as unnecessary and will resent it.

There is some truth to this. A colleague was just telling me that some of their students in a required class are very vocal about not seeing it as valuable or as something that will enhance their professional goals.

That said, students don't always know what is best for them or for their professional development.

But we do, right? :-)

We are professional educators, so yes, we know what is better for producing knowledgeable, skilled, and flexible workers and people than an 18 year old undergraduate.

[dismalist]

But would we want to?

If somebody came to me for advice to study Economics, bingo, I got all the answers. Do such and such and at the very least minor in math. Now, suppose someone asks for advice on how to get into business. That can be done with econ UG, but a better answer is to major in business. So far, so good.

Now suppose the subject I'm teaching is on the verge of being cancelled on account of low enrollments. Does the ordinary advisor say study something else, endangering himself, or study what I have to offer.

We follow our own interests much more than students' interests.

[eigen]

One problem we have is that a lot of students have really bad experiences in introductory language classes. Most of our TT language faculty don't like teaching "language instruction", so the folks teaching our intro classes are a revolving door of adjuncts/visitors.

It's (interestingly) the same problem we have with math: many math faculty don't really view calculus and below as belonging in college level math, so they all avoid it as much as they can.

And this isn't to say some of the visitors and adjuncts aren't great, but they're rarely here long enough for students to make meaningful connections (SLAC, so this is important) and a lot of peoples first semesters teaching are rough. I know mine were.

We also have a lot of logistical issues: language classes only being offered in one super popular class block, or in awkward places that block out multiple other courses.

What I see is more of my incoming students are *interested* in learning languages than they have been, but the barriers to them actually doing that are a lot more intense.