Quote:
Originally Posted by steven
Masaegu, do you know what the age group of the survey is? Do you have any details on it?
I was actually surprised to see that 26% apparently don't have any interest in learning another language.
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Actually, I'm surprised to see that 74% are interested!
In America;
* More than 200 million children in China are studying English, a compulsory subject for all Chinese primary school students. By comparison, only about 24,000 of approximately 54 million elementary and secondary school children in the United States are studying Chinese.
* According to the Center for Applied Linguistics, only 31% of American elementary schools (and 24% of public elementary schools) report teaching foreign languages.
79% of those schools focus on giving introductory exposure to a language rather than achieving overall proficiency.
* Only 44% of American high school students are enrolled in foreign language classes as reported by the 2002 Digest of Education Statistics. Of those students, 69% are enrolled in Spanish and 18% in French.
Less than 1% of American high school students combined study Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Japanese, Korean, Russian or Urdu.
* Less than 8% of United States undergraduates take foreign language courses, and less than 2% study abroad in any given year. Foreign language degrees account for only 1% of undergraduate degrees conferred in the United States.