The nearest American civics class is some 3,000 miles away. These are Dutch students debating in English to improve their language skills. Not one has been to Britain, much less the United States, but their accents are virtually flawless. They may trip up occasionally over difficult bits of grammar, but their vocabulary, fluency and confidence rivals–or exceeds-that of many American teens. This isn’t a special school; it’s Echnaton intermediate for ages 12 to 18 in the new town of Almere, a bleak constellation of modern buildings on landfill about 15 miles outside Amsterdam. And these aren’t special kids: many are the children of poor families that took government grants to be relocated into Almere. But that’s the point. In Holland, foreign languages are not reserved for an academic elite.
Twenty years ago, foreign-language classes in the Netherlands taught students to translate, perfectly, a French text into Dutch and vice versa on a final exam. But the Netherlands is a small country in a world that doesn’t speak much Dutch. In the 1970s, the government decided to rework its foreign-language teaching based on the country’s realistic needs. The revamped is now lauded educators as the ideal one for a world that is growing smaller.
Dutch officials made the ability to communicate their first priority; schools now strive for depth rather than breadth. With a few exceptions, only English, French and German are taught below the university level. Virtually all children take English, the most academic students take all three–sometimes for as many as eight years. Classes for all students at every level emphasize using the new language in an everyday way. “We stress communicative skills-listening and speaking in ordinary situations,” says Immink. “If they write, they write letters in real situations, they report a stolen bike or they pay the rent on their house.”
The Dutch do have some natural advantages. “American foreign-language teachers would sell their souls for some of the features of the Dutch system,“says Richard D. Lambert, director of the National Foreign Language Center in Washington, D.C. Dutch students are strongly motivated to study language because as adults they will be expected to use other languages regularly. And while languages are sometimes considered an extra in the United States, it is assumed that everyone in the Netherlands should study language intensively. “We feel languages are an innate thing in children,” says Immink. “They should want to achieve something in every lesson and they can. We want to keep them involved.”
The Dutch system isn’t perfect; curious students can’t study Arabic or Russian or any other tongue until college. Until then, they have to depend on English, French, German and Dutch to get by.
