Consider the classroom you are sitting in as you read this. Look around a bit, really look at the students around you.
Quite a few students, right? And, (hopefully you are not noticing this for the first time), they all come from many different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
In an area as racially diverse as the Long Island suburbs, it stands to reason that a similarly diverse number of languages should be taught in our schools. However, studies have shown that the education in these different languages is not nearly as varying as expected.
In the 2020-21 Report from the Office of Bilingual Education and World Languages in the Long Island Region, the languages most often chosen by students to study are Romance languages, originating from European countries. The report provides a graph on page 14, displaying the high number of students who received their NYSSB in Spanish, Italian and French, especially disproportionate when compared to students who studied languages such as Korean, Bangla, Tagalog and others. The fact is that public schools do not usually offer a variety of languages in their World Language courses. Traditionally, schools on Long Island will only present Romance languages as options for students who want to study a foreign language.
As a first-generation Korean-American, I acknowledge that I am rapidly losing touch with my roots. My experience with Korean is painfully limited. Any form of Korean education was skipped over me entirely. I learned English, my parents having realized the undeniable practicality of teaching their children the language most commonly spoken in the country where they now live. In missing my chance to learn my ancestral language during my childhood, I had hoped to make up for it when I grew older.
Reaching high school, however, I was dismayed by the lack of options. Rather than live out my dreams of writing my grandmother a birthday card in the language she could read and understand, I was confined to three choices, none of which particularly appealed to me. They were all interesting in their own ways, but none of them were languages I could truly immerse myself in, no matter how hard I tried.
I understand the challenges in implementing so many different languages in one school, especially given the difficulty of finding a teacher suitable for teaching that language and determining whether or not enough student interest would be generated for the class to run. Trying to teach a wide variety of languages so suddenly is not feasible, at least not soon. But my hope is that, someday, students on Long Island will have access to a greater variety of languages, catering to a diverse and vibrant population of students, allowing them to remain in contact with their respective cultures.
