Skillful employment of the English language is something that I remember as always being natural for me, despite the fact that I had a late start learning it (began learning at age 2 1/2). I believe that part of this was due to intense tutoring from my loving mother, and part can be ascribed to my willingness to play with language and learn from mistakes. As such, English has been an area where I have consistently performed above average. However, upon entering my senior year of high school, I found that I still could not diagram a sentence nor identify most parts of speech. I knew how to employ words, just not why. Also, by this point, I found my writing style, while fanciful and superfluous, was not really evolving as much as it had been in the past. My freshmen year in college history classes showed me just how ill prepared I was to adapt my "skills" (if I could even call them that anymore) to differing academic disciplines. I consistently received B grades on papers in history and other liberal arts courses, which demanded that I do away with the highfalutin and bombastic nature of writing to which I had previously accustomed myself.
Though I had finally learned the parts of speech by the end of my senior year of high school, via French class, I still did not understand most of the why. French taught me what the parts were, and even began to teach me to think about etymologies and how certain colloquialisms came about. But because I took only introductory French, my ability to think critically about language was still in its infancy.
Later in my collegiate career, I began studying Latin, eventually graduating with a minor in the subject, and am currently working towards earning a teaching certification in it. It was through the mid and upper level Latin courses that I finally began to think critically about language. I now think about how words are formed, about structures, and about how word placement affects the interpretation by the reader. I am focusing on subtleties of language, and now find that I can fluidly change styles on a whim. I can write stream-of-consciousness when writing informally, poetically and pompously when I desire to show off, and more concise when writing academically.
The point of all I have aforementioned is this: I learned to be a better writer by thinking critically about a foreign language. This is because learning a new language (especially in the upper levels) challenged me to see my own language in a new, unique light. I know that for some, English classes are enough to teach students how to write adaptively in order to match the individual's style to any discipline. For me, though, it took learning a new language. I would suggest, though I currently have no research to back it up, that I am not alone or unique in this situation. I therefore suggest that it is imperative that we begin teaching our children foreign languages at elementary levels, before synaptic pruning has made acquisition of new languages much more difficult. Learning two (or more) languages at the same time, at increasing difficulty as they grow up, will, I believe, create more proficient writers (which in turn helps during public speaking) who are more aware of the intricacies of language. They will also be more persuasive, and as such, will hopefully be able to identify persuasive techniques, making them more conscientious decision-makers. Lastly, learning a second language fluently will make our students more competitive globally. Honestly, I see no negative outcome to my proposal.
We're are on the same page here. I was born into an english speaking household, but at an early age I learned Spanish. Because the language part of my brain was accessed before it quit developing I was able to learn more languages, and communicate my thoughts through higher level thinking. This is all because I learned to look at my own language critcally at a young age. We need to expose students to other languagues in younger grades because it will help them in the rest of their lives whether it is with language or thinking on a higher level.
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