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APRIL 2005

Martha Abbott: Doyenne of Global Languages

By Joan Baum, Ph.D.

Martha (Marty) Abbott, Director of Education for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), whose previous work in education includes over 30 years teaching and coordinating language programs in Fairfax County (VA) schools, all levels, and whose resume boasts language and literature study in Latin as well as in Spanish, spontaneously offers up one of her favorite sayings—from Vergil’s Aeneid, Possunt quia posse videntur—“They were able to do it because they believed they could do it.” The mantra, which served her well in teaching, reflects her ebullience and smarts. ACTFL could not have a more enthusiastic and thoughtful head of its national initiative, 2005: The Year of Languages. Why now? She laughs, well, showing how much humor informs her meeting the challenges, which are difficult indeed. Well, she could say it’s because of the alignment of the planets, but in truth, a lot of things began to coalesce, especially after 9 /11: the government’s acknowledgment that barely 30% of its employees in significant positions could have translated terrorist chatter or Arabic embassy documents; the fact that the European Union had had its own successful Year of Languages in 2001, a program centered on having EU citizens become proficient in another language and somewhat conversant in three or four other tongues; the emerging importance of China in the world economy; and the need for bilingual speakers in regions with multi-ethnic populations with whom The United States has vital interests, such as Afghanistan.

Do the efforts of ACTFL mean that Pashtu, even Arabic, will be taught K-12? No, at least not immediately, Marty Abbott says, but the initiative does mean to signal the importance of foreign languages in American education. “We’re asking American children to learn at least one language other than their own.” The implication is that whatever the language, the model will be formed.

The Year of Languages signals the kickoff of a major PR campaign at all levels, federal, state, city, local, to acknowledge, fund, study, and evaluate the study of foreign languages. A Discover Languages logo has already appeared on TV, in newspapers, and on signs in government agencies. Both the Pentagon and the National Security Council, for example, agencies she recently visited, pledging their support, as did Congress, reflected in Senate and House proclamations (text is available on the ACTFL website).

One of the more successful techniques to make ordinary citizens aware of the importance of renewed attention to foreign languages has been what Marty Abbott gleefully calls the “languish ambush” or pop quiz, where ACTFL staff go out on the street and randomly ask passersby, in a foreign language, do you know what time it is? The results, she says, are what you’d expect. ACTFL wants to change that, incrementally.

ACTFL, “the only national organization dedicated to the improvement and expansion of the teaching and learning of all languages at all levels of instruction throughout the U.S.,”  notes on its website the “ambitious” nature of the initiative.  It’s just the beginning, says Marty Abbott. This is the wake up year, but she expects soon that the organization will come up with criteria for strategic research studies and for evaluations that will show foreign language study as important to the schools as the arts. Yes, she is aware of the bad reputation the teaching of languages has had in the U.S. for a long time, at the bottom right after mathematics as the most poorly taught discipline in schools. But all that’s changing with new attention to processes that stress comprehension, reading and speaking. A middle school in Fairfax, introduced a Japanese Immersion Program that was wildly successful, at least to judge from the students eating sushi!  Foreign languages like mathematics, Marty Abbott points out, are the only sequential disciplines in the schools. Teachers assume a continuum and rely on what has been taught earlier, regardless of what grades and years of study actually mean. Language study now involves content areas, so that youngsters learning about the butterfly, for example, get instruction in English that is then reinforced in another language. One can only hope that 2005 will be, as they say in Latin, an annus mirabilis.#

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