subject: How Acquiring and Using another Language? [print this page] Because of this concern for the nation's seemingly invisible language needs, foreign language scholars and organizations have stressed that a national language policy should advocate and materially support all languages, not just those deemed "critical" by the U.S. military and intelligence communities. Pratt, for one, warns that foreign language scholars must "make themselves heard as advocates not for particular languages but for the importance of knowing languages and of knowing the world through languages" as an important dimension of citizenship. Similarly, the Joint National Committee for Languages and the National Council for Languages and International Studies acknowledges that a national language policy should address the nation's security needs, but it also calls for this policy to position foreign language education as a "core academic subject" because "study of and through another language Juicy Couture Watch enhances learning through improved cognitive development, transferable reading skills, [and] reinforcement of other subject areas".
In making these arguments, foreign language scholars attempt to broaden the national language policy's working definition of "language" so that it guides educational programs according to a vision of each particular language as a unique lens that refracts a person's perceptions. The utilitarian view of foreign languages that Pratt and others contest can been seen most clearly in President Bush and DoD leaders' talk about languages being military tools. U.S. Colonel Michael R. Simone of the Defense Language Institute stated this view most bluntly when he declared, "Language is our weapon." Simone's assertion suggests that U.S. political and military leaders see foreign languages as tools used to ascertain and translate information and to kill terrorists. In making this argument, Simone reinscribes what Min-Zhan Lu calls a "commodity approach" toward language learning and use. This perspective on language, Lu argues, has "locked our attention" on identifying what language "tools" one needs while ignoring how individuals' languages choices have "real consequences for [their] well-being". As Lu contends, this utilitarian perspective on language learning and language use works to reassure people "that we can simply 'ease in and out' of disparate social domains, languages, englishes, discourses, prototypical selfhoods, relations with others and the world in the same way one picks up and puts down a tool (or slips into and out of a dress) without any 'real' effects on one's Authentic Selfhood". By reinforcing this "commodity approach" toward language acquisition, the national security language policy defines "effective" language use in a way that all but ignores the need for critical engagement with the cultural and linguistic Juicy Couture Nacklaces contexts that influence how one can and wants to use the language within his or her personal, professional, and civic lives.
Moreover, it denies how acquiring and using another language, although it does not determine one's sense of political, cultural, and social identity, does create possibilities for one to negotiate these identities in new ways and to reshape one's relations to other cultures. Scholars must advocate for more complex understandings of language acquisition and use in order to ensure that a national language policy provides sufficient material support for a range of foreign language education programs, kindergarten through graduate education that give students time to develop this critical dimension to language use.
