High school graduates average two years of foreign language coursework. What do adults have to show for it? The General Social Survey allows rather precise estimates. It asks respondents, “Can you speak a language other than English?,” “How well do you speak that language?,” and “Is that a language you first learned as a child at home, in school, or is it one that you learned elsewhere?”32 The results could scarcely be worse. Schools make virtually no one fluent in a foreign language (see Figure 2.5). Only .7% claim to have learned a foreign language “very well” in school; another 1.7% claim
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