Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

194 Language Diversity in the Classroomand bring you safely home again and a thorough reworking ofpedagogical rhetoric doesn’t amount to sale prices.Broadly speaking, there are two paths through the woods, althoughoccasionally they share the same ground. The first is for foreign-languageteaching to satisfy itself with that shrinking pool of students intrinsicallyinterested in languages and their cultures. These are, after all, the studentsnearest to one’s own intellectual heart. The problem is that the ‘natural’constituency here might prove too small to support a discipline at desiredlevels, and it is hard to nurture in any direct way. The other is to hope andwork for a renewed instrumental interest, with whatever longer-termfallout that might lead to. To some extent, this is dependent upon a contextthat extends well beyond national borders, upon alterations in globallinguistic circumstance that, while inevitable, are not always easy topredict. But one could argue, as well, that things might be done at home in an increasingly multilingual Britain, for instance, or, in an Americawhere the number of Hispanics has recently overtaken that of blackAmericans. This latter situation is an instructive one.The study of Spanish in the United States is self-evidently important:it is a language with a lengthy cultural and literary tradition, with manyinteresting branches to the original trunk. At the same time, it remains awidely used variety around the world; with something like 300 millionspeakers, it runs fourth (behind Hindi, Chinese and English) in the usagesweepstakes. Academically, then, it is the ideal American secondlanguage, and so, with both a global and a national presence, it is nowonder that Spanish is indeed the linchpin of modern-language teachingin the United States.Thewholearea,however,remainsweak weaker than one might firstexpect. Even though statistics assembled by the Modern LanguageAssociation (see Edwards, 2001) showed an overall increase of about 5%in foreign-language enrolments since 1995, only 1.2 million college studentswere represented here, fewer than 8% of the total. There were steepdeclines in some quarters: enrolments in German were reportedly downby 7.5% (90,000 students altogether), and those in French decreased by 3%(to about 200,000). But for Spanish, the figures were better. With enrolmentsup by about 8%, which translates to some 660,000 students, one can seethat students of Spanish constituted 55% of all tertiary-level languagestudents. Is Spanish learning in a healthy situation, then, or does it onlyseem so in comparison with weaker sisters? This may be an impossiblequestion to answer. After all, how many students ought to be studyingSpanish or archaeology, or quantum mechanics, or sculpture? Still, onemight expect that language study would be more immediately related to