Teaching Foreign Language in Elementary Schools

Three Images that relate specifically to my topic include:

 1.      A graph showing the portion of the US population which is bilingual compared to the proportions in the European Union and other countries of the world2.      Images of students learning in a foreign language classroom3.      Images of the development of children’s brains with respect to area that corresponds to language in the brain The graph would provide a useful representation of just how behind the US is when it comes to progress in foreign language education.  This visual would make a clear impact upon the viewer because the discrepancies are so prominent between our nation’s bilingual population and the populations of other nations around the world.  Problems which might be faced with this type of representation include that fact that a graph cannot represent the entire picture of the situation.  Such factors that could cause the presentation to be deceiving include the differing sizes of various populations, the distribution of the bilingual population within a nation, the situational factors which cause it to be a necessity for some nations to be bi/multi-lingual, and the relative wealth available to nations in order to pursue foreign language education as an additional discipline in their schools.  In order to address these problems, I would need to establish a clear framework for the context of the visual.  For instance, I would need to accompany the visual with adequate explanatory text. Images of students learning foreign languages in a classroom would be useful in getting the idea out there that several schools have undertaken the challenge to incorporate foreign language education in their curricula.  Showing situations in such classrooms helps promote the idea of other schools’ foreign language program develop.  However, some such images run the risk of being perceived as deceptive.  Most know that when photographs are being taken to promote a cause the situations are staged and are not often accurate to the true situation.  For instance, a photograph might show a foreign language teacher working one-on-one with a student who practices reading or speaking in the foreign language.  However, in most typical classrooms this situation of continuous personal attention is not feasible for a teacher.  To avoid these types of problems I would need to select images that look like they are taken in the actual context of the real situation.  Another way to avoid problems is to include brief statements about where the picture was taken and informative background about it. 

Images that show a child’s developing brain and its activity in areas related to language learning help to show the scientific basis behind the reasoning that children are most equipped biologically to successfully acquire a second language.  Such an image might be used in comparison with the brain images of older children and adults.  This comparison would be very useful because it would highlight the differences between children learners as compared to adolescent and adult learners when it comes to language learning.  With these types of images, one of the problems that might be encountered is that often with scientific data what is being seen has to be thoroughly explained by an expert.  Since few things in science are clear and simple, such explanations have the chance of confusing the general public.  In confronting this problem, I would have to thoroughly understand the explanations given by the experts on the image and paraphrase the explanations in more understandable terms.