I do firmly believe that the university should have a foreign language requirement. There is a reason throughout all stages of school students are encouraged to learn a new language; acquiring a second language not only increases a student's cultural awareness, but it helps them become more adept with their own language as well because they need to know the metalinguistic terms for their foreign language studies. Someone who only knows their native tongue can easily forget after high school what a direct object is in a sentence, or what it means for a verb to be transitive, but because a student must use these grammatical terms to learn how a different language's grammar works, they become more familiar with the metalinguistic terms. As their elementary vocabulary increases in their second language, their intellectual vocabulary drastically increases in their mother tongue as well.
The expansion of the student's cultural knowledge is also very important in their development into adulthood. It can be very easy to live solely in the box that is the United States and forget about the intricacies of the rest of the world, but by learning the language of a different culture a student's interest in that culture also increases, broadening their horizons and possibly changing the way they think about the world. While language may not be related to whatever specialty a student chooses in college, it is important to require foreign language classes because many students would not otherwise take a language at all, leaving them clueless to the beauty of emerging oneself into an unseen part of the world.
Learning a language is very important for kids in school because its starting to show them the world outside their own. Being brought up in a house where you are not introduced to a new culture will not benefit the child once he/she reaches their college stage. In high school i believe that it is very important to learn another language but once college comes i feel it is more important to learn about culture and the way people in these cultures celebrate religion, current events, ect..
ReplyDeleteI do agree that it is pertinent to life to be culturally aware and as citizens in the United States, it is easy to be caught up in our one seemingly encompassing media and culture. Through foreign language learning, a myriad of different opinions and cultural practices are introduced. However, I would question how important it is to have quite so much importance placed on grammar. Although it is important, people can still speak and write without knowing the direct object of a sentence.
ReplyDeleteIt is great to see that we are all extremely concerned with building up walls at our borders and trying to shut out the rest of the world. People get so pent up with the stress of their everyday lives that they refuse to look beyond their own nose and realize that there are real issues out there that need to be dealt with. Having an understanding of how the rest of the world lives and looks at us will build us into a more tolerant nation as a whole.
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