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Editorial.(Brief Article)
It never ceases to amaze me how foreign language teaching norms vary in the places where I have lived, taught and worked. I grew up in small town in the southeastern United States where foreign languages were optional in elementary and secondary school. My older friends told me that foreign languages were not required to enter the university and my parents let me make my own choices so I opted out. I chose not to study any foreign languages during elementary or high school. When I entered the university, I became interested in languages and studied Russian.
In the mid-80s, I moved to Finland to study Russian, Finnish and international relations and found, to my surprise, that in Finnish schools all students must begin studying their first foreign language at around age nine. They have a choice of which language to study and they usually choose English.
Language planners in Finland feel choices during basic education are made by parents, not students. Educated parents tend to make educated choices while others may not. Education is usually linked to economic prosperity. So if given the choice better-off may choose to study languages while less well-off students may chose not to study foreign languages and thus limit their opportunities for the future.
In addition, Finland has two official languages: Finnish and Swedish. The Finnish native-speakers (around 92% of the population) must begin studying Swedish and Swedish native-speakers (around 7% of the population) must begin studying Swedish at around age 11 so everyone can understand both of the nation's official languages. Students must begin another foreign language at around age 12. Usually by the end of junior high school, all students have studied the country's other native language and at least two foreign languages. In order to graduate from college or university, students must speak, read and write both of the country's official languages and at least one foreign language and sometimes more depending on their major subject. This is very different from Tennessee where I grew up.
I studied, worked and taught in Finland until the early 90s when I moved to Japan to teach English in junior high school through the Japanese Ministry of Education's Japan Exchange Teaching Program which I highly recommend. In Japan I found that ...
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Source: HighBeam Research, Editorial.(Brief Article)