That is not what I see in the case quoted where ritualistic greeting and farewell in another language had replaced the common language used, in this case English. Young kids love learning and a mixture of cultures in a community gives an opportunity to share. Kids who grow up together learn to understand something of differences around them, and the essential similarities. That area of learning is a part of the foundation building for their own confidence and feeling accepted.

A policy approach on what languages are to be shared and how, would seem to be just loading learning institutions rather than creating understanding of children and their communities.

Dick
I agree with your extension of my late night comment. Diversity is a strength in a community and personal development highlights the expression of that.

As much as the great education clobbering machine rolls on with many swings to varied bright ideas and emphasis, individual grow and blossom. many at different times of their lives. Some feel less happy about how the education system treated them.

My point about an engineer was not meant to refer to his wealth of personal growth but as someone who provides specialised technical knowledge and perspective.

Whether she/he be rich, poor, from a multitude of cultural and language exposure, they are not the determining factors as to whether he or she is competent as an engineer in the technical setting.

Adding rich alternative language experience and learning is applauded by many but is just another point of view as to what is important.
Comment and research around the advantages of learning another language is varied. There are swings and roundabouts.
You can’t do everything in the busy years of growing up.

Appropriate achievement and some measure of acceptance is a basis for a healthy individual in any culture.

In NZ we have a very mixed cultural legacy which is experienced in varied ways for each of us. No one way is right but home is the base for most and the language of the home is very important.

A lot of research points to the level of home language acquisition being a strong determinant in a persons language functioning. Rich experience in home language before the age of 6 seems particularly important. Research with multi lingual home situations generally does not run counter to this important finding.

The matter of a young persons identity also appears to be quite strongly linked with home language.

National standards and minimal standard in English are elitist and destructive in my view.

Making Maori compulsory is silly as it is a minority language in NZ. No denigration of Maori implied.

Do we need one compulsory language ? Having English as the main language of instruction is difficult enough for many, English speaking and otherwise.

To have a life shaping judgment made on your ability to measure up to an arbitrary standard in a language is an old system that continues to be promulgated.

That is the mark of a system based on competition, winners and losers.

Well when the engineer is tired and cusses at his mistake he can do it in another language To be any good in a language you either have to immerse yourself in another country or spending many hours studying hard. It’s just an endless stream of words to learn A person ought to do it out of wanting to rather than anything else

No, of course not. That’s not the argument.

You have your engineer learn another language to become a better person.

It would be a good idea for a linguist to learn a smattering of engineering for the same reason.

Actually, its not entirely true that learning another language would not make a better engineer. A lot of engineering is about communicating ideas. Learning a second language *does* help with communication skills in the primary language. But sure, it probably won’t help much with the calculation components of engineering.

The time and other overheads of learning extra languages is high…

Yes, there is a cost associated with education. So, what? What is important is whether the benefit outweighs the cost.

Would you want National Standards in such language teaching.

Of course not.

What a small minded thing to say. I see kindergarten and year one and two kids being taught very basic Maori, i.e. days of the week, months of the year, count to 10, animals, “my name is ….” etc… There is also fun in these lessons, songs to sing. I see kids loving this.

I see language learning as a child differently. If they start in primary school then they will have a better chance of learning the second language grammar in high school than starting from scratch.

German helped me understand English – I never knew we had a present continuous tense or even the existence of one. We did learn a lot about advertising Jargon and war poetry though

@Loota – beautiful post, brings a tear to my eye

Not suitable for laypeople who need only plain language explanations, but for an expert it seems quite suitable. I suppose the same applies in medicine, which also seems full of latin.

Your last paragraph indicates that you do appreciate the contribution another language brings in terms of colour and depth to a passage so perhaps latin could be considered in the same light?

I agree learning early is best but learning the high end syntax in grammar in language is actually quite helpful for understanding English grammar. Learning French actually helped my quite a lot with learning English because you see things in your own language you never noticed before. Learning to speak the language as a kid doesn’t do that as we all know from our learning of English.

It depends on when you start learning these other languages. I’m sorry to say that I never really learned English grammar even to this day, people leave high school without knowing English grammar. This should be taught. Then they get to uni and lecturers have to help the class out with it. I was lucky to have well spoken teachers and Ma so learned pretty good English by osmosis.

It really depends on when you start the languages, by the time a student reaches high school language learning is no longer like a sponge. Languages are very time consuming to learn well – with the exception of people who just get fluent in six months I’ve learned in my life that sometimes you have to put aside things that you enjoy, that are not quite your strengths in order to have the time to get ahead in life.