At GA, students have a hard choice to make when they walk in, choose one of four languages, French, Spanish, Latin or Chinese and to stick with their language until they’ve reached level three in their respective language where they can stop and try something else, quit or wait until senior year to take German.
While Chinese, English, French and Spanish are dominant world languages in 2026, other languages emerge from the list of the most popular languages around the world like Arabic, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian and Japanese which aren’t provided at GA. As many other languages’ are spoken by other speakers around the world, GA should increase the amount of languages that they offer to include more languages spoken from around the world because of the many benefits they bring to students through job interviews, inclusiveness and preparation for the real world.
First, learning more languages can help students with their future career or internship opportunities as many companies like candidates applying for jobs that speak two or more languages. Which can allow some customers to communicate in their native languages and communicate with those that are international.
Second, adding more languages will help make our school more inclusive. As of now, most of the languages are native to Europe, and a bit of East Asia. So it would be important to add languages that are native to other continents such as Asia, Africa and South America to help with the diversity.
GA can benefit from these changes as our students will be more well-prepared for the real world by taking on other language courses.
For example, if a student travelled to a country where the native language isn’t English, they can be exposed to more problems in the country such as, scams or pickpockets, which can be reduced by learning more languages, as they can reduce the amount of problems that occur by understanding what’s going on.
Additionally, adding more languages will really benefit GA as they can help the students mind. It has been shown that learning more languages can promote sharper focus, which helps students block out distractions, pay closer attention and focus during class.
Lastly, learning more languages can help students develop cultural awareness and appreciation for other cultures. Students are able to learn and relate to other cultures and can socialize with peers who also know the same culture, which helps make GA feel more inclusive. Through food projects or travel brochures on countries that have those languages as their native languages, these activities can expose students to have more cultural awareness
Although it is hard to add more language classes into a schedule, there are a few ways that GA can tackle this issue.
First, a way they can do this is making Duolingo available to all students through a shared GA account, so that they can use a language app to help them learn languages, and add competitions with duolingo that end in house points or prizes to engage student interest.
Second, GA can add clubs that teach languages and the culture of the other languages, so the students have a stress free environment where they can have fun and learn more languages.
Although GA lacks some important aspects of language learning, I believe with a few changes, the flaws can be fixed by adding school wide competitions for students to become more engaged with learning languages and help them commit to learning it and adding clubs that teach new languages of different cultures.