MIAMI—Dorothy Villarreal grew up dreaming in Spanish, first in Mexico and later in South Texas, where her family moved when she was six. She excelled in school in English. But, at home, life was in Spanish, from the long afternoon chats with her grandparents to the Spanish-language version of Barbie magazines she eagerly awaited each month. She figured she was fluent in both languages.
Then the Harvard University junior spent last summer studying in Mexico and realized just how big the gaps in her Spanish were.
“We were talking about the presidential election, and there was so much I wanted to explain,” Villarreal said. “We’d end up playing a guessing game where I’d speak in English, and my friends, they’d speak back in Spanish to guess what I was saying.”
Villarreal’s experience is increasingly common in America, where one in five children grows up in a home where English isn’t the sole language. To help them fill in the gaps, universities are adapting their foreign language curriculum, in part to better prepare graduates for a globalized world where it pays to be professionally fluent in more than one language.
Children in multi-lingual homes grow up a step ahead of other would-be language learners. They can easily engage in small talk or follow the latest soap opera in their families’ native language. Yet when it comes to meatier topics, or reading and writing, they are stuck.
The linguistic gaps become apparent in high school, where these students can snooze through basic language classes but often drown in more advanced ones if their heritage language is even offered. After all, how many American high schools offer Arabic or Korean?
With 37 million Spanish-speakers in America, most heritage classes are in Spanish, and courses have bloomed across campuses in California, Florida and several Southwestern states. They have also begun to take hold in schools like Harvard University, which added a course this year.
