I recently received this letter from an education professor who studies foreign language acquisition. Reprinted anonymous with his permission. Enjoy! Dear Dr. Caplan, I saw your brief interview with Rob Maas about CRT on James Lindsey’s Twitter feed and then watched the whole interview in which you mentioned foreign languages. I’ve been researching this topic since 1990. The language field has always kept the measurement of how much Spanish, French, etc., that students learned vague and mysterious. I finally had the opportunity to conduct a study in which I could measure how much of a language that monolingual US students mastered after 1, 2, and 3 years of Spanish courses in high school by using a standardized measure normed with native Spanish speakers. The short answer, as you said, is not much at all. I’ve attached two papers with some of these findings. I had to “pull my punches” to get the papers published, but the results are clear that most students, even after three years, are non-fluent and illiterate in Spanish.
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Letter from a Linguist
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I recently received this letter from an education professor who studies foreign language acquisition. Reprinted anonymous with his permission. Enjoy! Dear Dr. Caplan, I saw your brief interview with Rob Maas about CRT on James Lindsey’s Twitter feed and then watched the whole interview in which you mentioned foreign languages. I’ve been researching this topic since 1990. The language field has always kept the measurement of how much Spanish, French, etc., that students learned vague and mysterious. I finally had the opportunity to conduct a study in which I could measure how much of a language that monolingual US students mastered after 1, 2, and 3 years of Spanish courses in high school by using a standardized measure normed with native Spanish speakers. The short answer, as you said, is not much at all. I’ve attached two papers with some of these findings. I had to “pull my punches” to get the papers published, but the results are clear that most students, even after three years, are non-fluent and illiterate in Spanish.