JOSHUA BENTON / The Dallas Morning News | Posted: Saturday, November 26, 2005 6:00 pm
DALLAS — You could write a fair history of late 20th-century America just by tracking the languages high school students learned in school. At the height of the Cold War, Russian was hot, spasibo (thank you) very much.
Japanese boomed in the late 1980s, when it seemed the rising sun would eclipse America’s economy. And by the morning of Sept. 12, 2001, Arabic was getting more attention than ever.
But say ni hao to the newest language to push its way to the forefront: Chinese.
Spurred by China’s increasing role in the global economy — and efforts by the Chinese and American governments — high schools across America are offering an Asian alternative to the traditional Spanish and French.
The programs teach the Mandarin dialect of the language.
“I wanted a language where I had no frame of reference, something totally different,” said Brent Rubin, a senior at North Texas’ private Greenhill School, which has a 10-year-old Chinese program. The number of students taking Chinese at Greenhill has tripled in the past four years — a growth rate that pushed the school to hire a second full-time teacher last month.
“We’re at a historical juncture where lots of people are setting China up in an adversarial role,” Greenhill teacher Warren Frerichs said. “I think some people are starting to think that Chinese could be part of their future success in life. There’s this sense that the world is flat.”
In 2000, when the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages did its last national survey, it found about 5,000 American high school students were taking Chinese. Two years later, a survey by the Chinese Language Teachers Association found 22,000.
Marty Abbott, the foreign language council’s director of education, said she estimates the total is between 30,000 and 50,000 today, based on the number of inquiries her group receives from schools anxious to start programs.
“It’s a very strong trend,” she said. “There is a general realization around the country that you are going to have to interact in this global village we live in. And China is obviously a growing part of that.”
A new Advanced Placement course in Chinese will debut next fall. When the College Board surveyed high schools several years ago to gauge interest in such a course, 2,400 said they were interested in offering it.
Chinese is still no threat to Spanish, the dominant foreign language nationwide. The 2000 language council’s survey found Spanish accounted for nearly 70 percent of all foreign-language instruction in America, far outpacing French (18.3 percent), German (4.8 percent), Latin (2.7 percent) and Italian (1.2 percent). The top non-Western language was Japanese, with just 0.8 percent.
Chinese is much harder for English speakers than European languages. The most obvious difficulty is the complex system of Chinese characters, the multistroke glyphs that look incomprehensible to the untrained.
But perhaps even tougher are the four tones of Mandarin — high, rising, falling-rising and falling — that give seemingly similar words completely different meanings. The word “da,” depending on the tone, can mean “to answer,” “to hit,” “to hang over something” or just “big.”
“Learning characters is just memorization,” said Greenhill junior TeQin Windham. “Tones are hard.”
In one recent class, Frerichs had his Chinese I students reading what looked like a baby’s nonsense syllables off a white board: “Ba ba. Ma ma. Ge ge. Jie jie. Di di. Mei mei.”
“Remember the tones!” Frerichs urged his students, since in each pairing the first syllable had a different tone than the second. (The words mean father, mother, older brother, older sister, younger brother and younger sister.)
Language programs are often boosted by foreign governments eager to spread their native tongues. The German government has traditionally been anxious to increase the boundaries of linguistic Deutschland and has paid for exchange programs for German teachers. Japanese foundations gave millions to support American language efforts at that nation’s economic peak.
Beijing has followed the pattern. The Chinese government is paying half of the $1.3 million cost of developing the new AP Chinese course.
The American government is getting involved, too. U.S. officials have been stung by their inability to find enough Arabic speakers to do the translation and diplomatic work required to manage the war on terrorism and the conflict in Iraq. As of 2004, the American Foreign Service employed just 27 diplomats worldwide who could speak Arabic at the level necessary for complex work.
In September, citing national defense interests, the Pentagon awarded a $700,000 grant to the school system of Portland, Ore., to double the size of its Mandarin immersion program. The program starts in elementary school and extends to a college Chinese program at the University of Oregon. More grants are coming.
“Chinese is a language of the future in the states,” said Betty Bourgeois, principal at Ursuline Academy, where the first seven-student class began meeting in August. “It’s going to be a language of commerce and of culture.”
Offering Chinese is not without obstacles. Finding qualified teachers can be difficult. Many native Chinese speakers lack the English or teaching skills necessary to connect in the classroom. Those who do can often make more money in business or by teaching at universities.
Public schools must worry about certification requirements dictated by state and federal rules. Texas, for example, offers certification tests for Spanish, French, German, Latin, Braille and American Sign Language — but not Chinese. That means teachers must seek certification in some other subject to fully meet state requirements.
And in many schools there are political battles to be fought. Teachers of traditional languages sometimes don’t welcome new languages that battle for the same students.
“The French and Spanish teachers who already have a stronghold, they feel threatened,” said Antonia Folarin Schleicher, executive director of the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages. “They are scared that, if they allow Chinese or Yoruba or Arabic, they’ll lose students and maybe lose their jobs.”
Frerichs said it’s hard to be an island of Asian studies in the West-centered curricula of most schools. If the history and literature classes focus on Europe, students will gravitate to the languages that match.
“With French or Spanish, the rest of the curriculum reinforces the importance of the language,” he said. “We don’t have that with Chinese.”
To close that gap, Frerichs teaches side classes on Asian literature in translation, Asian history and even tai chi.
It seems to be working. Greenhill’s Chinese enrollment has gone from 24 students four years ago to 76 today. Students’ reasons for enrolling are as varied as Chinese characters.
“It’s kind of like art with all the characters,” said seventh-grader Oliver Patten. “I probably know 40 or 50 words. It’s a lot of fun.”
His older brother Charles is more pragmatic. “It looks very good on a transcript,” the Greenhill freshman said.