Two Illinois lawmakers have introduced a bill that would remove the two-year foreign language requirement for high school.
The requirement was signed into law in 2021 but does not go into effect until 2028. High school students will need to have completed the requirement to graduate.
State Rep. Travis Weaver, representing a rural area between Peoria and the Quad Cities, is the Republican sponsor of the bill to have the requirement dropped.
He said AI is making learning another language not as valuable for students as they join the workforce.
“As I look at the value of foreign language, it's not that I'm saying that there's no value in it, I just think that there's a much higher value in other skills that are irreplaceable by AI.” Weaver said.
Weaver said technologies like Meta glasses are making it easier to translate foreign languages but there still needs to be some people who learn a foreign language because AI is not perfect.
Weaver said the bills he sponsored would allow students to take a Career and Technical Education course with their additional elective.
“I'd rather see us be higher prioritizing things that will enable students to quickly earn money, and those typically are more [Career and Technical Education] based programs,” Weaver said.
Weaver said he does not want to get rid of foreign languages, but wants families to have more control over what classes they take in high school.
“[I] think it's more likely that you're going to have a plumbing issue or an electrical issue or a carpentry issue than it is that you're ever going to need to speak German,” Weaver said.
AI vs. languages
Juliet Lynd is chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Culture at Illinois State University, which prepares foreign language teachers to teach across Illinois.
Lynd said AI can be good for basic transactions but does not have the nuance to help a doctor diagnose someone or help a person through court proceedings.
“I want all the nuance I can get if I'm in a courtroom trying to decide somebody's fate, guilty or innocent of a crime, I don't want to rely on basic translation skills for that,” Lynd said.
Lynd said being bilingual is still necessary and can create a lot of opportunities in whatever career a student decides to go into.
“We live in a multilingual society, so knowing another language is going to be helpful everywhere,” Lynd said.
Lynd said there are a lot of job opportunities that need people who are bilingual, especially in international business.
Lynd said students can also get college credit if they are bilingual or skip the language requirements in college. She adds ISU has a program to get more world language teachers into the field.
“I think that we need to do a better job communicating to students that it's an option out there,” Lynd said.
Implementation cost
Advocates for lifting the two-year foreign language requirement said the teacher shortage also makes the rule impractical.
Democratic state Rep. Rick Ryan, representing a Chicago suburb, introduced the bill. Ryan said he talked to principals, superintendents and teachers who said they wanted to remove the requirement because schools could not afford to hire new teachers and the requirement took the choice away from students.
“There are very few electives for the students to take anymore. Most of their classes are mandatory. They don't get to pick hardly anything,” Ryan said.
Ryan said making it an elective instead of mandatory means students can focus on what they are passionate about like in the arts or shop classes.
Ryan said his constituents want to remove the requirement because they will not be able to meet the requirements by 2028 and do not have the money to hire new teachers.
Ryan said two years of instruction is likely not enough time to learn a new language anyway.
“I don't know how much of a language you can learn in two years of high school classes,” Ryan said. “You're certainly not going to become fluent in the language. You [would] have some basic understanding of the language.”
Ryan said he is not currently looking to make any requirements for elementary or middle schools.
Need for world languages
Susan Hildebrandt, professor of applied linguistics and Spanish at ISU, said Illinois should teach world languages because of the same reason that math is taught in Illinois schools. She adds students will go on to use a second language it throughout their lives, even if they are fluent in speaking the language.
“We're not expecting them to be literary scholars, but they may have a better relationship with their co-worker whose family speaks Spanish or Polish in Chicago or any one of the number of myriad languages that we have to draw upon in this state,” Hildebrandt said.
Hildebrandt said learning a second language is important in a multilingual society.
“I would challenge the legislators to think about the opportunities that language education paired with [Career and Technology Education] could bring. There are languages with different pedagogies for teaching languages for specific purposes," she said.
Hildebrandt said offering digital classes, particularly to rural schools, can fill gaps in districts that are having trouble incentivizing a teacher to work there. She said that would help each school offer more than just Spanish and French.
“We could get a critical mass across a [region] to have a Japanese class in a high school, and [digital courses] might capture some of those students who really don't want to take Spanish,” Hildebrandt said.
Weaver said he believes students will be get more benefit from learning math than a second language and that missing out on the basics of math will leave more students behind.
"I learned calculus and trigonometry. I never use calculus and trigonometry. The value of those subjects was to teach me how to learn," Weaver said.
The bill has been referred to an Illinois House committee.
