Big debate this morning over foreign languages in the pages of the New York Times. This time, it’s the economist Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard from 2001 and 2006, who’s sparked the polemic. This is the same Mr. Summers who became famous in 2005 for declaring that the reason women are under-represented in engineering and in science is because of a “different availability of aptitude at the high end.”

This time, Summers is applying a simplistic analysis to language. In an article titled “What You (Really) Need to Know,” Summers coughs up a number of common place ideas about the future of education. In his fifth point, he argues that learning and speaking a foreign tongue is no longer worth the investment. Why? Because English will do the job.

The diverging opinions are worth reading, all the more so since evidently not all Americans share Mr. Summers’s point of view.

What do you think?

Read Lawrence Summers’ article »

The New York Times debate »

On January 14th, The New York Times published a very interesting article by writer Michael Erard explaining why the assumption that the U.S.A. is mainly a monolingual country is flawed.

He raises the key point that the United States Census Bureau only asks households what language they speak at home rather than a more telling question like, “Can you have a conversation in a language besides your mother tongue?” Until that is the case, Erard argues that “claims about American monolingualism will almost certainly be overstated.”

Read the article here »

Babel No More by Michael Erard

Who is predisposed to learn new languages? Michael Erard’s book, Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners, will answer that question.

The book came about after Erard wrote an article for a pop science magazine that aimed to explain the science behind hyperpolyglots (people who can speak six or more languages). He realized how much more could be researched and written about the fascinating topic of language superlearners.

For more information:

www.MichaelErard.com
www.BabelNoMore.com