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Massachusetts Secondary Schools: These statistics were gathered in 1994 by the Massachusetts Foreign Language Association. They were given to me by Cheryl Baggs.
 These statistics are from a report made in Fall of 1994, presented in a paper by Jamie B. Draper and June H. Hicks of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, which was in turn presented by Cheryl Baggs, Richard Hreschak, and Donna Van Handle at the Massachusetts Foreign Language Association conference on October 25, 1996. For more information, please see my Bibliography.
The apparent contradictions between the above chart and the Massachusetts chart are not easily explained, but are probably attributable to differences in research methods for the two studies. It is also very possible that languages such as Arabic, offered in two Massachusetts districts but having only 172 students nation-wide, have only a very small enrollment in each of the districts. Additionally, some numbers of students in the national survey were estimated due to lack of precise knowledge, which could also have skewed the results. In my student survey I asked students which languages were taught at their secondary schools. Although I did not ask them whether their secondary schools were public or private, the results they generated still have much in common with the 1996 national results and the 1994 Massachusetts results, above. Note that although I had 21 student respondents, these results are based on 22 high schools, as one respondent attended two different schools and described them both.  As in the Massachusetts survey, the most popular languages were Spanish, French, and Latin.  All of these students came from schools that taught more than one language. As in Massachusetts, the most popular number of languages to offer was 3. Please note that segments on the graph represent only the few students in my sample; 5% looks impressive, but it is only one student out of 22! I asked the department heads why certain languages are taught; though most did not know why the languages had been originally selected, they offered many reasons for their continuation. Many of the educators commented that the languages had been offered long before they arrived at the district; for many this was in the 1960s, so many of the languages (especially French, Spanish, and Latin) have been offered in Massachusetts for at least 40 years. The results generated by this question on the survey show that each language is offered for several different reasons. The most popular reasons for offering Spanish are that it is useful in travel, a large population of people speak it, it is useful in business, we are geographically close to Spanish-speaking areas, and it is an easy language to learn. The results for French were slightly different - it too was valued for travel and because of the large world population of French speakers, but many of the educators also said that French is a beautiful language and that "educated people" traditionally use it. There was a much smaller set of reasons for offering Latin, the most popular being the great literature written in that language. The other languages in the survey results were taught at fewer than three schools. Reasons offered for teaching German included the range of literature in German, its importance for business and travel, and its beauty; for Chinese its role in business and the availability of a teacher; for Italian that parents or administrators requested it, that students' ancestors spoke Italian, that it is beautiful and important for travel; and for American Sign Language that it eliminates deafness as a handicap. For some comment on several of these reasons, please see the latter part of my page "Reasons for Choosing a Language." Of the educators I surveyed, 9 of them (82% of the group) said that under ideal circumstances their districts would offer more languages than they do at the present time. The most popular languages that the educators hoped to offer were Chinese and Japanese, as shown in the graph below.  Issues common to public schools prevent the educators for developing programs in those languages - they lack proper funding, classroom space, and qualified teachers. In addition, the language departments are subject to the decrees of administrators and parents. "There are many students with Italian ancestry who would like to take Italian. The adminstration will not allow it to be offered," wrote one teacher. Taught Languages and Difficulty I had the teachers rank a group of languages on how difficult they are for students to learn (More about this is available in my section on Attitudes Toward Difficulty), then I compared these results with which languages are offered at their schools. As you can see in the graph below, only one school taught a language that its department head labelled with a difficulty ranking greater than 5.  These results do not necessarily mean that the schools are avoiding teaching languages considered to be more difficult. The languages that the teachers ranked as easiest (the Romance languages, German, and Latin) are, as seen above, also considered to be useful for travel, business, and education. However, it is troubling that other languages just as useful for business, spoken by just as many people, and just as easy to learn are not being offered to secondary school students. For more information about this, please see my Conclusions. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
