G. Richard Tucker is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Head of the Department of Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. His research as an applied linguist deals with various aspects of second language learning and teaching. He is a recipient of the Eliott Dunlap Smith Award for Excellence in Teaching. Dr. Tucker received his Ph.D. from McGill University in 1968, and has been at Carnegie Mellon since 1992. |
Chapter 8, selection: Learning Other Languages:
The Case for Promoting Bilinguality Within an International Community Every European country has a national policy for introducing
at least one foreign language into the elementary school curriculum of
every child (Dickson & Cumming 1996). And, a provocative study commissioned
by the British Council (Graddol 1997), after examining an array of economic,
demographic and political indicators, concluded that by the middle of
the 21st century the linguistic monopoly of English will give rise to
an oligopoly in which Chinese, Hindi, English, Spanish and Arabic will
compete for attention, with bilingual proficiency becoming an absolute
necessity for participants in the global economy. More recently, Voght
(2000, 269) has argued that, "The colleges and universities that
prosper in the future are those that will, among other things, focus foreign
language curricula on the needs of students specializing in business and
other professions while modifying their business and professional courses
and programs to include foreign languages, international perspectives
and cross-cultural content." What is the likelihood that students in American universities
and colleges will graduate with bilingual proficiency and cross-cultural
competence as a matter of course? And what role can Carnegie Mellon play
in this bridging and adaptive process? The number of languages spoken throughout the world is
estimated to be approximately 6,000 (Grimes 1992). Although people frequently
observe that a small number of languages such as Arabic, Bengali, English,
French, Hindi, Malay, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish serve
as important link languages or languages of wider communication around
the world, these are very often spoken as second, third, fourth or later-acquired
languages by their speakers (see, for example, Cheshire 1991 Comrie 1987
Edwards 1994). The available evidence seems to indicate that governments
in many countries deliberately present a somewhat skewed picture of monolingualism
as normative by the explicit or implicit language policies that they adopt
and promulgate (Crystal 1987). Thus, fewer than 25 percent of the world's
approximately 200 countries recognize two or more official languageswith
a mere handful recognizing more than two (e.g., India, Luxembourg, and
Nigeria). |
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