Programming As A Foreign Language?

[Zaune]

Courier-Journal, via Reddit.

FRANKFORT, KY. — Legislation that would let students use computer programming courses to satisfy foreign-language requirements in public schools moved forward in the Kentucky Senate on Thursday.

Supporters said the measure, Senate Bill 16, would help prepare students for good-paying jobs in the computer industry. It passed the Senate Education Committee on a 10-1 vote.

“This offers opportunity for students and flexibility for schools at a time when flexibility is vital,” said Sen. David Givens, a Republican from Greensburg who is sponsoring the bill.

Kentucky students must earn 22 credits to graduate high school, but 15 of those credits represent requirements for math, science, social studies and English — and college prerequisites call on students to have two credits of foreign language, Givens said.

Meanwhile, Givens pointed to national statistics showing that less than 2.4 percent of college students graduate with a degree in computer science despite a high demand in the market and jobs that start with $60,000 salaries.

“We’ve got to make room in the curriculum and in the electives to try and drive computer programming closer to the start of that student’s high school studies,” he said.

Sen. Denise Harper Angel, a Democrat from Louisville who opposed the measure, said she had some questions that she wants to discuss with Givens before stating them publicly.

Givens said later that he has not spoken with House Education Chairman Derrick Graham, D-Frankfort, about passing the bill through the House.

The committee on Thursday also approved Senate Bill 55, which would prohibit the state Department of Education from punishing school districts by withholding funds from the Support Education Excellence in Kentucky program, known as SEEK.

Givens, who is sponsoring the bill, said he is not aware of any instance when SEEK money was withheld as a punitive measure but has heard concerns that it could happen.

SB 55 cleared the committee without opposition.

I have seriously mixed feelings about this. I mean, it's great that schools are starting to raise their game on IT training; it's a pretty damn depressing state of affairs if employers are having to bring people in from overseas because of a lack of qualified local applicants when unemployment's officially around 7% and probably higher in reality.

And yet... Well, I'm just not massively comfortable with the idea of sidelining foreign languages because they're not so easy to monetise. Only being able to speak one language cripples your ability to live or work outside the country you're born in and severely limits your ability to so much as take an overseas vacation, and I don't think that's healthy for a country.

[Alkaloid]

If programming counts as a foreign language then plumbing or carpentry should as well. I'm not saying it's not a useful skill to have, but understanding programming languages is having a skill you can use to build something, not communicate with other people.

[Dartzap]

I was surprised only the other day to hear that the ConDems have made coding a mandatory part of the national curriculum for primary schools and above. Wish that had been around in the 90's!

[Grumman]

Only being able to speak one language cripples your ability to live or work outside the country you're born in and severely limits your ability to so much as take an overseas vacation, and I don't think that's healthy for a country.

That is nonsense. About 20% of the world's population speaks English. Do you really think that not adding another 3% by learning French is going to cripple your ability to travel?

[Zaune]

I was surprised only the other day to hear that the ConDems have made coding a mandatory part of the national curriculum for primary schools and above. Wish that had been around in the 90's!

Likewise. I was really into computers when I was a kid, until GCSE IT happened. Didn't realise I was good at working with them until it was too late.

That is nonsense. About 20% of the world's population speaks English. Do you really think that not adding another 3% by learning French is going to cripple your ability to travel?

It bloody well does if you want to see the bits of a country that aren't specifically set up to cater to tourists.

[Gandalf]

That is nonsense. About 20% of the world's population speaks English. Do you really think that not adding another 3% by learning French is going to cripple your ability to travel?

What about Mandarin/Spanish?

They'll certainly help employment in the future.

[Grumman]

That is nonsense. About 20% of the world's population speaks English. Do you really think that not adding another 3% by learning French is going to cripple your ability to travel?

It bloody well does if you want to see the bits of a country that aren't specifically set up to cater to tourists.

No, it cripples your ability to see the bits of France that aren't set up to cater to tourists. Unless you're going to learn another dozen languages on top of that, you've only opened up a marginally larger portion of the world.

What about Mandarin/Spanish?

They'll certainly help employment in the future.

That could certainly be of use, but that's a question of learning the right foreign language, not a foreign language.

[Lolpah]

That is nonsense. About 20% of the world's population speaks English. Do you really think that not adding another 3% by learning French is going to cripple your ability to travel?

It bloody well does if you want to see the bits of a country that aren't specifically set up to cater to tourists.

Not necessarily, if you do enough planning beforehand (just because locations don't support English doesn't mean there aren't guides online or elsewhere on how to get to them etc.) and perhaps learn a few words and useful phrases (e.g. to order food).

[Welf]

No, it cripples your ability to see the bits of France that aren't set up to cater to tourists. Unless you're going to learn another dozen languages on top of that, you've only opened up a marginally larger portion of the world.

That could certainly be of use, but that's a question of learning the right foreign language, not a foreign language.

French is spoken by 110 million speakers worldwide as native language and 190 million as second language. It's the or one official language in 25 countries.
And if you speak French, it gives access to French films, science, literature in their original. It gives you access to a new culture and new ideas. And that is much, much more useful than learning an if-loop.
Also, it's not like you can't have both.

[Broomstick]

Also, it's not like you can't have both.

^ This.

Arguably, being a polyglot has been the more common state for humanity since we all came out of Africa.

This is nothing more than a penny-pinching dodge to avoid paying for teachers for actual living languages other than English. It's yet another example valuing STEM to the exclusion of everything else from language to physical activity. To clarify: while I would be the first to argue that STEM topics are a necessity in today's world they are not the only thing we should be teaching our children. Worse yet, the US does a piss-poor job of teaching STEM despite neglecting nearly everything else in the interest of promoting it.

Frankly, at this point I'd be in favor making a study of Spanish mandatory in the US given the increasing Hispanic population and the proximity of Latin America. This will make some folks scream but to me it's a reflection of reality.

[Channel72]

I sort of agree with Grumman's point. After English, Spanish, Mandarin and Arabic, learning any additional languages only nets you a very small percentage of increased communication potential.

I think not knowing Spanish in the United States is pretty crippling, however, considering how many people speak Spanish here. But I guess it depends where in the US you live. Spanish should probably be taught starting in elementary schools. I was actually pleasantly surprised to see how many children's television programs (like Dora the Explorer) emphasize learning Spanish to small children.

[Zaune]

French is spoken by 110 million speakers worldwide as native language and 190 million as second language. It's the or one official language in 25 countries.
And if you speak French, it gives access to French films, science, literature in their original. It gives you access to a new culture and new ideas.

Plus, if you have achieved reasonable fluency in one Romance language, you have a good head start on being able to make yourself understood in the others.

In any case, I don't much mind which modern languages are taught in schools. I just think it's important that we strive to ensure that everyone should leave school with at least a rudimentary grasp of a language beside their native one, simply because it gives them more choice about what to do with their lives.

[Dr. Trainwreck]

IIRC learning two languages at an early age has other cognitive benefits, so foreign languages are not useless no matter how you cut it even if you can't see yourself actually travelling to these countries.

Saying that there are not enough opportunities in your area or that you don't have the money for it is understandable, but to me it's preposterous to just outright dismiss their usefulness.

[fordlltwm]

I've never understood the obsession with french as THE foreign language taught in schools, it's not as widely spoken as many other languages but in most british state schools it is the only foreign language you get taught for 3 years, at which point you drop it and do something useful like business studies, especially if you live in wales where your education is already crippled due to the requirement to do all your subjects in Welsh including the sciences until you get to sixth form college, at which point you have to relearn all the terminology in english so as to be able to study at university.

[Edi]

IIRC learning two languages at an early age has other cognitive benefits, so foreign languages are not useless no matter how you cut it even if you can't see yourself actually travelling to these countries.

Saying that there are not enough opportunities in your area or that you don't have the money for it is understandable, but to me it's preposterous to just outright dismiss their usefulness.

This.

And Grumman, 20% of the world's population speaks English? A good number of those people have such poor skills that you will have enormous difficulty in interacting with them despite their nominal (and often it is just that, in name only) proficiency.

Learning other languages makes learning more linguistic skills and retaining all kinds of things easier, because you need to seriously exercise your brain in order to do so. Once you learn one or two additional languages, you begin to see connections between other languages (even unrelated ones) where there are similarities. Learning new languages also allows you to understand cultural issues, because it is often impossible to do so unless you speak at least some of their language.

Furthermore, if there is a job on offer where you might run into foreigners and have to deal with them, all other things being equal, who is going to get hired, the person who speaks only one language, or the one who speaks two? Remember that the foreigner might not speak your language, but might speak the one you have as a second language.

Case in point, a Turkish guy asked me for some directions the other day. He spoke English very badly, no Finnish. He did speak very good German, so between his good German and bad English and my excellent English and rudimentary German, we had no difficulty conducting an extended conversation for the duration of the subway trip to the stop where he got off the train. If either one of us had not been multilingual, we'd have been reduced to point and mime with a few words here and there.

The proposal to use programming as a foreign language instead of as a crafts skill is nothing more than chest-beating "Ruh-duh, we don't need no stinking furriner languages!" bullshit.

[Broomstick]

I've never understood the obsession with french as THE foreign language taught in schools, it's not as widely spoken as many other languages but in most british state schools it is the only foreign language you get taught for 3 years, at which point you drop it and do something useful like business studies, especially if you live in wales where your education is already crippled due to the requirement to do all your subjects in Welsh including the sciences until you get to sixth form college, at which point you have to relearn all the terminology in english so as to be able to study at university.

French used to be far more prominent internationally that it currently is and served Europe (and other parts of the world) as a common second language. This was true up through, I think, WWI or WWII (I'm sure one of our historians will correct me if I'm wrong on that) which means as recently as 70-100 years ago. As some parts of academia and education move slowly it shouldn't be a surprise that there is inertia in these matters.

When I was in school French was seen as more prestigious than Spanish. Of course, living right next door to Canada, it was also arguably more useful to learn in that particular time and place. Spanish has become much more common in the US at large in my lifetime. I would like to learn Spanish now but I just don't have the funds for formal classes. I've tried studying on my own, which I can do with French, but I think in my case I need formal training up to a certain point before I can become a self-directed and self-sustaining student. I've picked up a little through osmosis - which fact alone illustrates just how common Spanish is becoming even in the northern US - but that's about it.

[Zaune]

I've never understood the obsession with french as THE foreign language taught in schools, it's not as widely spoken as many other languages but in most british state schools it is the only foreign language you get taught for 3 years, at which point you drop it and do something useful like business studies, especially if you live in wales where your education is already crippled due to the requirement to do all your subjects in Welsh including the sciences until you get to sixth form college, at which point you have to relearn all the terminology in english so as to be able to study at university.

Well, France does happen to be the closest country to us that doesn't share our official language, and the only one currently accessible by train.

And in any case, I happen to know for a fact that plenty of schools offer the option to take German or Spanish instead. It'd be nice to see a couple from outside Europe at some point, but hey.

[Edi]

The usefulness of French depends on what part of the world you live in. Vast areas of North and Central Africa speak French due to their former status as French colonies. In many places down there it is the only common language inside a country because the people generally speak their own tribal languages and French (in addition to otehr tribal languages they may have picked up).

In Europe French is spoken by a sizable chunk of the population (France, parts of Switzerland, and in all areas bordering France it is a very common second language).

In the western hemisphere, it is a lot less useful because everyone south of the US-Mexico border speaks Spanish (or in Brazil's case Portuguese, which is grammatically similar and it is easy to read the writing if you know Spanish, though the spoken language sounds markedly different).

Elsewhere in the world, Russian and Chinese allow you to travel with a lot less language problems than if you only know English.

[Starglider]

especially if you live in wales where your education is already crippled due to the requirement to do all your subjects in Welsh including the sciences

Fortunately less than a quarter of Welsh parents are cruel enough to force their children to study in a useless language.

[Ralin]

Speaking as an American who has lived and worked abroad and who needed to learn a foreign language for my academic interests, and who really wishes I'd been able to learn Cajun French growing up?

Good.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not denying that learning a foreign language has all kinds of potential benefits, but most Americans don't really need to know one and even fewer are going to learn one to any appreciable degree. I'd much rather see high school students graduate having skills they can maybe parley into a livelihood than for them to graduate with the ability to baby-speak in French or Spanish and maybe a handful of them be decent at it. Foreign language education in American public schools is doing a very limited amount of good.

That's not to say that students shouldn't have the chance to learn a foreign language in high school if they want to, or that some places don’t do a good job of teaching them, but in general? Yeah, not that important.

Only being able to speak one language cripples your ability to live or work outside the country you're born in and severely limits your ability to so much as take an overseas vacation, and I don't think that's healthy for a country.

Any American whose biggest concern is having difficulty communicating when they take a vacation to France or the Caribbean is doing a hell of a lot better than most.

The proposal to use programming as a foreign language instead of as a crafts skill is nothing more than chest-beating "Ruh-duh, we don't need no stinking furriner languages!" bullshit.

Edi, I think you maybe don’t get just how bad foreign language education in America is. It’s not about choosing between learning a foreign language and learning a craft. In most cases it’s about choosing between learning a craft and learning essentially nothing. And that doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon.

[Jub]

I hated languages in school, but that was probably because I was being taught my first lick of French at 13 when middle school started. I think that if you're going to do languages as a required subject, you need to start the students young and give them options. If you can't do at least the first of those, then you need to accept that your course is pretty much going to be useless to the people forced to take it.

[LaCroix]

I am a software developer, and if someone would tell me or any of my collegues that a programming language counts as a foreign language, we would laugh that person out of the door... That's like claiming someone is a NFL level football player because he can catch every second ball casually tossed in his direction.

Foreign languages are a casual thing over here - you start with English before you reach puberty, and 30-40% of us go to Gymnasium(High school equivalent), where you need to learn Latin, and a second foreign langage on top of English. Another 20-30% go to Business Academy (also a high school type), which also requires a second foreign language. Usually, Italian, French or Spanish.

And then there's the fact that most of our immigrants are bilingual, as well, adding another language to their scorecard.

[Ralin]

I hated languages in school, but that was probably because I was being taught my first lick of French at 13 when middle school started. I think that if you're going to do languages as a required subject, you need to start the students young and give them options. If you can't do at least the first of those, then you need to accept that your course is pretty much going to be useless to the people forced to take it.

On that note, removing the requirement could well lead to a net improvement for language learning, since it would help weed out the students who flat out don't want to be there and have no interest in the subject.

[Jub]

I hated languages in school, but that was probably because I was being taught my first lick of French at 13 when middle school started. I think that if you're going to do languages as a required subject, you need to start the students young and give them options. If you can't do at least the first of those, then you need to accept that your course is pretty much going to be useless to the people forced to take it.

On that note, removing the requirement could well lead to a net improvement for language learning, since it would help weed out the students who flat out don't want to be there and have no interest in the subject.

Yeah, it gives people that won't use the language anyway a chance to take a course that offers more value to them and it means that those who do take the course get better class sizes and likely learn at a faster pace. It's one of those courses where you have to fix it and those are pretty much the only options for doing so.

[Ralin]

Foreign languages are a casual thing over here - you start with English before you reach puberty, and 30-40% of us go to Gymnasium(High school equivalent), where you need to learn Latin, and a second foreign langage on top of English. Another 20-30% go to Business Academy (also a high school type), which also requires a second foreign language. Usually, Italian, French or Spanish.

And then there's the fact that most of our immigrants are bilingual, as well, adding another language to their scorecard.

Well okay, but that means what exactly? No one is saying that it can't be done or that foreign languages can't be taught well. But Americans aren't likely to stop being shit at learning foreign languages anytime soon, and changing that would take a whole lot of reforms and cultural changes that just aren't going to be feasible anytime soon.