LANGUAGE BARRIER
Will Latin and German have a place in post-pandemic high schools? As schools emerge from COVID-19, teachers of world languages worry they’ll be overlooked
When Barrington High School French teacher Kathryn Wolfkiel’s students returned to the classroom after months of COVID-19 remote learning, she quickly realized that mandatory mask-wearing would make speaking and comprehending the language très difficile.
“I ordered a bunch of masks online that have clear plastic over the mouth so we’d be able to see each other speaking,” Wolfkiel, the head of the school’s world languages department. “I thought I’d give it a shot, but the new masks didn’t work because the plastic got all steamed up, so they couldn’t see my mouth, and I couldn’t see theirs.”
Despite the challenges, she has found one silver lining: “It’s very difficult to mumble if you have a mask on,” she said, “so everyone needs to speak up and be a little bit more attentive.”
The pandemic doesn’t seem to have dimmed students’ interest in learning a foreign language, several Chicago-area educators told the Tribune.
But some say it has illuminated struggles for world language programs that surfaced long before schools shut down in March 2020, in particular, a failure to interest enough students to offer entrylevel courses in languages like Latin, German, Mandarin and Japanese.
The pandemic also exposed what some describe as disparities in world language offerings, sometimes even within the same school district.
At Hinsdale South High School, Principal Arwen Pokorny Lyp said only around five students signed up for Latin 1, and four students for German 1 — an unsustainable level of enrollment that prompted the cancellation of the two classes for this coming fall.
“The Latin and German programs are absolutely not being cut, and we have a thriving world language program at the high school,” Pokorny Lyp said, adding that several upper-level courses in Latin and German will still be offered in the fall.
“Our belief is this was just an off year. ... If we had enough students, obviously we would not have decided not to run the class,” Pokorny Lyp said.
The tepid enrollment might be attributed in part to COVID-19 restrictions that have prohibited recruitment events at feeder middle schools, a practice that has helped enthusiastic teachers attract new crops of students, Pokorny Lyp said.
While Hinsdale South students have the option to take Latin 1 and German 1 at the other District 86 high school, Hinsdale Central, Pokorny Lyp said “all of the students seemed to be on the fence and said they’d rather just change their class.”
Still, Hinsdale South sophomore Anastasia Galinski, 16, said the cancellations are an example of what she described as a history of inequities between the two high schools.
Hinsdale Central enrolls around 2,700 students, just 5% who are categorized as low-income. Hinsdale South, located in Darien, has 1,400 students, and nearly a quarter are low-income.
“To be clear, this is not about courses being canceled because no students were enrolled. It is about students, including incoming freshmen, being denied courses because they were enrolled at Hinsdale South instead of Hinsdale Central,” Galinski told the school board last month, adding: “It seems we have crossed yet another threshold in District 86 of denying students access to curriculum based on where they live.”
The low level of participation in language programs at U.S. schools was underscored in a 2017 National K-12 Foreign Language Enrollment Survey Report, which found that only around 13% of Illinois students in kindergarten through 12th grade were enrolled in a language program.
At the time of the report, which looked at all 50 states and Washington, D.C., 11 states had foreign language graduation requirements, 16 had none and 24 had graduation requirements that could be fulfilled by several subjects, including a foreign language.
In Illinois, a foreign language requirement is scheduled to take effect for students entering ninth grade in the 2028-29 school year.
The expectation of many American travelers that English is spoken across the world — while many U.S. students are still monolingual when they graduate from high school — is troubling to Amanda Seewald, president of the Joint National Committee for Languages-National Council for Languages and International Studies.
“There’s this twisted logic that language class is somehow extra or ‘special,’ and it’s often ends up being the class where students are pulled from if they need extra help in another subject,” said Seewald. She’s disheartened that some states, including Texas, have passed legislation in recent years allowing computer science classes like coding to count toward foreign language credits.
The tendency of school districts to cancel lower-enrolled programs, with some now limiting language offerings to Spanish and French, was happening well before the pandemic, Seewald said, “but we’re shining a light on it now.”
With the $190 billion federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Education Relief Fund earmarked to help schools recover from the pandemic, Seewald is hopeful that the moment has finally arrived to better support and expand world language programs.
“Cutting back on language programs hinders our students’ abilities to become global citizens ... it hurts national security, equity and social justice,” said Seewald. “We need our local school boards, parents, states and the federal government to understand the value of multilingual students, and that they’re an asset to our nation.”
For Judy Saurí, a recently retired Chicago Public Schools principal, the popularity of dual language programs across the U.S. is not only encouraging, but evidence of a growing appreciation for the importance of bilingual education.
“CPS should invest in dual language programs, because everyone wins,” said Saurí, former principal at Edwards Dual Language Fine & Performing Arts IB School in Archer Heights and president of the Illinois affiliate of National Association for Bilingual Education.
Around 90% of Edwards’ kindergartners are enrolled in the Spanish dual language program, Saurí said.
“The beauty of learning any language is you can then navigate another language because you learn the patterns, and a third language comes much easier,” Saurí said. “We have become a global society, and learning another language is part of education equity.”
In Hinsdale District 86, Adolph and Elena Galinski of Burr Ridge said they’re proud that their daughter, Anastasia, who is studying Spanish at Hinsdale South, has become an advocate for world language equity at her school.
“My parents were immigrants from Greece, so I was bilingual growing up, and I think it helped me have a better understanding of where people from the rest of the world were coming from,” Elena Galinski said, adding: “When you learn another language, you also can talk to and interact with people for whom English is not their first language, which shows respect.”