Every once in awhile we start hearing–again–about how poorly American kids are doing in school, how they lag behind just about every other industrialized country in pretty much everything (or so it seems). I submit that one way to alleviate this problem is to offer or require more foreign language study. American balk at this idea because not needing to speak another language is almost a point of pride with some American. Let me clue you in: it’s nothing to be proud of.

Data collected by the Admission Testing Program of the College Board show a definite positive correlation between Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores and the study of foreign languages. For example, in one test group students who had taken no foreign language in high school achieved a mean score of 366 on the verbal portion of the SAT, and 409 on the math portion. Students who had taken only one year of a foreign language had slightly higher scores (378 and 416), whereas students with two years of foreign language showed more dramatic increases (417 and 463). Each additional year of language study brought a further rise in scores, with students who had studied a language for five years or more achieving an average of 504 on the verbal and 535 on the math portion of the exam. Please take note that even math scores seemed to benefit from taking a foreign language.

Learning a foreign language is easier than you think, if you use sound learning methods. Besides helping our kids do better, at almost any age the study of languages opens doors; literal ones, figurative ones. Just getting a new window on the world such as a language offers makes it worth the very reasonable amount of effort. You learned one language. You can learn another. Or several.