Reply to Has anyone's child become fluent in a language not spoken at home exclusively by learning in middle or high school?

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Reply to "Has anyone's child become fluent in a language not spoken at home exclusively by learning in middle or high school?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What can be done to improve it? Is foreign language taught differently elsewhere? Or is it simply because English is the most important language to know so there is not the urgency to learn another language?[/quote]

PP here. I lived abroad for a year to study a relatively obscure (and very difficult language) and the primary difference between the language institute I went to and the  German classes I took in high school was the heavy emphasis on teaching the students at the language institute to communicate in the language. My German instruction in high school was centered around worksheets and tests, which works well if you’re trying to grade students for GPA purposes, but is terrible if you want to teach them to speak the language. It’s not as if I wasn’t tested abroad—but it was using an exam designed for the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, which is communication-based. When I returned to the US and decided to pick up German again at university, for some reason we were reading fairy tales, which is near-useless for talking with someone in the 21st century.[/quote]

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