Yes, I can fully subscribe to this point of view. These students certainly have the potential to teach English in later life. I wonder, however, whether I would let them teach Spanish to my kid (if I had one). Because I would imagine that their Spanish might be a tad bit limited to domestic vocabulary…

In other cases Spanish might be the dominant language. But then again, in these cases the ability to teach English is usually rather limited. Granted, there are numerous exceptions to this rule, these are people with a particular knack for languages…

Yeah, I was labouring under the same impression. But then, of course, I am not a native speaker of English and in no position to pass judgment…

I fully agree that there happen to be people…

I fully agree that there are happen to be people who, because of their upbringing in favourable circumstances, are indeed fully bilingual or even trilingual.

The experience in Europe with its vast variety of languages and dialects, however, does show that full multilingualism will, even in the most favourable circumstances, always remain the absolute exception, the realm of those particularly gifted in this field.

Example:

Luxembourg, the country with the highest per capita income in Europe, has long been proud of the trilingualism of her citizens, who claim to be equally fluent in Luxembourgish, French and German. And visitors to this small but elegant country really might get the impression that each and every Luxembourger is fully trilingual.

But then the Luxembourg government took the daring step of testing this bold assertion - and their findings were not entirely to their liking:

18-year old Luxembourg high school graduates were, as an experiment, confronted with complicated texts from the fields of history, sociology, politics and economics, which had previously been part of high school graduation examinations in Germany respectively in France and francophone Belgium. The students were required to reiterate the arguments presented in the texts.

The result was sobering.

The examiners felt that, in the German language exams, the Luxembourgers could merely be credited with roughly half of the percentage points that the German school-leavers had obtained.

In French the Luxembourgers fared a little bit better. But even in this language they managed to obtain only 60% of the score of the French and Belgian students.

For want of a reference group the question of how good the Luxembourgers are in Luxembourgish could not be examined, Luxembourgish not being spoken outside the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, except by expatriate Luxembourgers…

Recently I had the chance of meeting an engineer from Luxembourg with whom I had entered into written correspondence before (in French). I first talked to him in English. But then I thought it might be more polite if I switched to French, although my French is not really up to scratch, as DDA and Someguy will be able to confirm.

But it seems that I was not doing him a favour - he stopped me after a couple of sentences with the words: I am sorry, I can read and write French, but your spoken French is simply too fast for me.

Now maybe he was merely trying to be polite and intended to prevent me from making a fool of myself by speaking a language which I do not fully master.

But my impression was that meant what he said, that he genuinely had problems with the understanding of French spoken at an above-average speed…

Define “native speaker.” Do you mean someone who speaks that language as a first language? Here in the US, with our large multilingual population which speaks one language at home and another in public, we have millions of people who are competent bilinguals. Most of our Hispanic students were born in the US to Spanish-speaking families. Their first language is Spanish. Some of them arrived in kindergarten as competent English speakers. A majority qualify for ESL support, but by third grade, most of these will demonstrate full proficiency and be out of ESL. Last year I had a first grade kid move from ESL to a third grade reading level by the end of the year. He was bright and loved to read. Because these kids are in an English-language rich environment for seven hours a day, most of our Hispanics, born and raised in Spanish-speaking homes, will become English-dominant by the end of elementary school. Moreover, there are plenty of native speakers with a poor command of English. Western Confucian is right. A language exam should be part of the hiring process. US public school teachers are required to pass a battery of English tests that include reading, writing, and usage components.

globalvillage:

agreed - I was just stating the legal situation in Germany.

BTW, the policy of making all young Germans trilingual in German, English and French is also at the root of the German fascination with Canada, as this is one of the few countries or territories where we can potentially recruit instructors for both of the foreign languages we require, the other countries being Cameroon and Mauritius - and arguably the British Channel Islands (with a preponderance of English in Guernsey and of French in Jersey).

Maybe people here have long been wondering about my fascination with the linguistic situation in Canada. I do not concern myself with this for fun - it is my job to do so. My interest in the village of Casselman in Prescott-Russell, Ont is also strictly professional. I’ve been there once, the place is not really very exciting. But I have to keep up with each and every step they are taking over there. After all, that’s what I do for a living…