RJA 14: Field Research Report

I chose to survey two of my classes, one called Diversity and Communication in the U.S. with 20 students and the other called The History of English with 25 students, asking each person their age, whether they had had experience studying language, if so then how, and how fruitful their efforts were.  The Div. and Comm. class had a total of four people older than 30, while the English class had only one.  The results were as follows...

While 38 out of 40 young people had had experience studying language, none of the older people had studied a foreign language.
The 38 young people who had studied language had done so as part of their compulsory education, mostly in high school; no one had studied out of their own volition.
No one reported having gained fluency in their studies; most people reported in fact that they only barely could speak their language if at all.

This was fantastic support for my claim that language education in America is simply in adequate, and should be beefed up.