🚀 go-pugleaf

I did not read all articles under this FLR heading. I responded mereyly to
one part of somebody's posting who claimed that foreign language learning
did just this.

It is NOT enough to go and talk to people who have taken foreign language
courses to support such contentions!! We can't form social policy and
course requirements based on such an UNSCIENTIFICALLY UNSOUND SURVERY!!

It is too easy find yourself being convinced that the actual state of affairs
is just what you were prepared to believe to begin with.

Your contentions may be merely biased opions!! We do not know, in  the absence
of emprical, experimental  data, done with perhaps double blind experiments,
that learning a foreign language itself is EVEN a factor in the purported
ehnhaced learning of the native language (for many of us here, English).

Maybe the motiviations of those around such students are responsible, maybe
the general academic atmosphere, maybe there is NOT a SIGNIFICANT correllation
at all!!

You seem to be in engineering, you know how much hard work and research MUST
go into  answering questions of this nature, questions that involve some
slippery aspect of human nature or culture, questions which often are
heavily saddeled with a great deal of emotional bias and cultural perceptions.

Well, perhaps, engineering may not be the background required for you
to appreciate this issue, it's more in the nature of statistical methods
used by people in psychology, anthropology, sociobiology, sociology,
biology, medical research, biostatistics, etc, etc..

In referance to the dry lecture bit, I was referring to the ethnic-type
studies.
To max its benefits, I feel it should be heavily particpatory--something which
challenges the student and forces him/her to confront the cultures he/she
is studying head on, instead of the dry lectures which, because students may
fail to appreciate the relavance of the courses to themselves or to their
immediate interests, cause
them to merely go through the course, robot-like, without gaining anything
significant from the experience other than having memorized
soon-to-be forgotten details.

This then is a far, far more effecient means to
the cultural benefits
that is claimed for foreign language study. It is a matter of economy,
priorities, time, and money: there is TOO much that needs to be learned,
and this situation will only get worse as the knowledge explosion continues!

If foreign language study
do not really serve enough of a useful purpose, then there are many
more subjects that we need to address that can (and I feel ), should replace
it.  Nevertheless, I beleive it is worthwhile to offer it as electives for those
whose interests, and goals are such that they feel they can benefit from such
studies, but not as requirements unless those who are making these extravagant,
unsupported claims can back it up with hard data (hopefully setup to be
as unbiased as possible).


The claims that these FLR are actually usefull to the scientific professional,
I beleive are also overinflated! I do not question that they can, under
particular
circumstances actually "come in handy". What I question is whether it is
worthwhile to spend as much as 3-4 years of college study + the (often) 2 or
more high school years in one language to even BEGIN to gain the kind of
mastery where it would  be possible to get the kind of benefits
claimed!! And then, when you realize that very, very few scientific or
mathematical professionals ACTUALLY use even a modicum of whatever feeble
foreign
languages they may have acquired in their previous trainings, and just HOW
REALLY ILLITERATE THEY ARE IN THESE FOREIGN languages NOW, you begin to
wonder just why you had to spend 2 years of high school and 1-3 years (or more)
of college learning this stuff!!!

Then you really begin to shake your head when you find out that a great deal
of scientific/math, engineering research literature are ACTUALLY writtten
in ENGLISH, EVEN OVERSEAS (and most of the remainder that are not
are REGULARLY, SYSTEMATICALLY, AND QUITE ACCURATELY translated into ENGLISH).
This is because ENGLISH
has become, for better or worse, really a WORLD language. Many countries
use ENGLISH as a second official language and it has literally began to take
roots in these countries and become almost as (not quite, except in a few
cases) native as the original language, spawing curious dialects, and
colloquoalisms (sp),
that are just now beginning to be appreciated as full ENGLISH dialects IN THEIR
OWN RIGHT!!

The claimed cultural links, I believe, are mere myths that were invented
by the humanities people and most of us have been duped into swallowing it
whole without critcal scrutiny because they have wrapped it up in beguiling
tinsels of a social agenda that a lot of us believe in.

Americans who only speak English should learn other languages AS THE NEED
REQUIRES!! If we begin to get more interational tourists, then those people in
the industry should learn foreign language AS A REQUIREMENT, but what good would
it do for others!!

Cultural understanding and tolerance can be, as I said above,
best be satisfied, to a much deeper extent, when we force ourselves, (perhaps
in a class situation as proposed above) to confront our prejudices and find
out and understand the prejudices which people from other cultures hold of us.
We need a participatory type course, ideally one where we are put into
PERSONAL contact with people of other cultures, where we can actively discuss
our differeces and commonalities.

Christ! I can't write like this. they want me to get off the system to replace
some damned disk!!