Dear Reader – in November of 2023, I was a finalist for ACTFL National Language Teacher of the Year. Though I didn’t end up winning, it was an incredible honor to be nominated and to share the stage with four colleagues I now consider friends. And Alicia is a really incredible teacher and advocate, so really, everyone wins!
As part of the application process, I had to write and deliver a 3-5 minute policy speech, like one might give to a political group. This is not exactly my wheelhouse, but I did the best I could, with LOTS of help from JJ Melgar, my BHS colleagues, and my husband. I am posting it below in all its imperfection so that maybe you might learn something from my experience, too. I have tried as best I can to link all citations and sources, and get the wording as close to how it was when I actually delivered it. (The draft I printed got a lot of marking up, even in the final hours before I had to deliver it!)
So…here it is! Enjoy…? 🙂
Prompt: THREE-to-FIVE-MINUTE PLATFORM/TOPIC OF INTEREST SPEECH GIVEN TO A CIVIC GROUP OR OTHER OUTSIDE ORGANIZATIONS, MAKING THE CASE FOR WORLD LANGUAGES. (as taken from the ACTFL TOY Selection Rubric)
Do you remember where you were when you found the words for what you believe in? Do you remember where you were when you realized how you will thrive, connect, and contribute in society?
For countless young people, these moments of discovery happen, as they did for me, in world language classes.
But we are at a moment in which we have an important decision to make: do we accelerate a trend of condemning K-12 and university language programs to wither and die, as is happening at West Virginia University and across our country, making the lives of our countrymen smaller, teaching our young people to cast a wary eye toward difference?
Or do we champion a bolder vision, do we set our hands to the creation of a more prosperous society that can mediate those differences, do we amplify our collective pursuit of happiness through intelligent investments in multilingualism for all?
Consider: At present, the Census Bureau reports that 79% of US residents speak only English, and the American Councils for International Education estimate that less than 20% of K-12 students are studying a language other than English at their school.
At the same time, the demand for multilingual employees is rising across the skill spectrum, including in healthcare, trade, and technical services. A survey by Ipsos Public Affairs indicates that “nearly one in four employers surveyed acknowledged losing or being unable to pursue a business opportunity over the singular lack of foreign language skills.” Businesses across our nation are pleading for investments in a more multilingual workforce, and why wouldn’t they?
Studies show that multilingual people have better reading abilities than monolinguals. Multilingual people have better overall academic performance. Multilingual people even show more rational decision making in their additional languages, and craft more creative scientific hypotheses. But these skills, these societal gains are lost with every program that gets abandoned.
I see the growth of these important skills in my own classroom across years of study. My first year learners initially encounter cultural differences as strange and off-putting, but with time, they are more able to observe other cultures from a stance of suspended judgment. Students move from using evaluative terms to more relative or descriptive terms for other cultures. Not bad, not strange, but different.
Our profession has evolved from fill-in-the-blank teaching toward engagement with the authentic voices of other cultures. Learners of German, Spanish, Japanese, are learning not only about, but with and from members of diverse cultural groups through multimedia documents on a wide variety of topics. They are reading magazine articles about futuristic technologies, watching video essays about intercultural identities, and analyzing infographics for trends, all in their new languages.
And instead of taking for granted what others might try to convince them about a given culture or group, they are listening deeply into these cultures and experiencing them through their own words. This is what we stand to lose if we turn our back on multilingual education.
We turn our back on international connection and business, on reconnections with family and heritage, on opportunities to find shared belief and shared humanity. Charlamagne is quoted as saying that “To have another language is to possess a second soul.” A soul is something that you must nurture and care for.
We must nurture and care for multilingual education, and invest in its sustained growth. We must nurture and restore funding to Title VI and Fulbright-Hays, which changed my life forever. We must take care to pass the World LEAP Act into law. We must invest in the protection of language departments like that of West Virginia University, so that our countrymen can thrive.
These programs are not in competition with initiatives in STEM, the trades, and vocational education: these are complementary and supportive initiatives. They are pennies on the dollar investments in a more innovative, connected, and peaceful future. I found the words for what I believe, and found humanity in myself and in others in a language classroom. Let us be champions of that future of possibilities: multilingualism for all.