ESL in the Private Sector for a Globalized Twenty-first Century

Abstract

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 led to an awakening in the United States to Americans’ woeful lack of fluency in foreign languages. As a result, the federal government supported a comprehensive plan, a roadmap for the development of foreign language capabilities to address the inherent dangers of American monolingualism. This ambitious plan sought to promote the introduction of foreign languages to the curriculum of schools from kindergarten through twelfth grade and beyond. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in Monterey, California was funded to support growth in key languages of the Middle East and Afghanistan. At American universities, languages previously designated less commonly taught such as Chinese, Arabic and Korean became mainstream, alongside Spanish — always a practical choice in the United States in light of the large Spanish-speaking populace. However, because of the technology boom of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, which drew students to more practical academic subjects in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, traditionally popular foreign languages such as German, French and Italian disappeared rapidly from the subject areas of universities and colleges across the US. Sadly, foreign languages in the United States are regarded as useful in general, only when they complement another primary field of study, and when they provide financial benefit to universities and their graduates.