Students Needs In Interconnected World

In today’s increasingly interconnected world, it’s incredibly important for everyone to speak more than one language, appreciate more than one culture, and communicate across borders and barriers.

We know from decades of empirical research that "language learning works best when it’s relevant and based on learners’ needs. Fundamentally, language is a tool that we use to do the things that are important to us, and that’s how we should be organizing our instruction. If more schools offered instruction that prepared learners to use the languages they are studying in a meaningful way, we wouldn’t have to convince people that language learning is a vital part of education–it would be as obvious to them as it is to anyone who has successfully learned a second language" (Dr. Nielson).

And, in the meantime, offering college credit for self-study language courses makes absolutely no sense at all. If anything, we should offer credit to students who can demonstrate real-world language proficiency, by carrying on conversations, reading instructions, writing emails, following recipes, understanding poetry, watching movies, listening to music, or participating in political debates. You know, the kinds of things that human beings use language to do all day long.