Precerpt from My 20th Language: First Language Literacy, the Lifelong Launchpad
First Language
Literacy: The Lifelong Launchpad
A foundational truth in my lifelong
language journey is this: literacy in one’s native language shapes the success
of all language learning that follows. Literacy builds the internal
architecture of language awareness—structure, logic, rhythm, and flexibility.
Those who develop high literacy in their first language possess a powerful
springboard for mastering others.
This difference becomes strikingly
clear when comparing institutional outcomes. I served as a leader in both the
Foreign Service Institute (FSI) and the Defense Language Institute (DLI), where
language instruction is intensive and time-bound. While students at both
schools receive nearly the same number of classroom hours, the proficiency
expectations differ significantly: FSI graduates are trained to reach
professional fluency, while DLI students typically aim for working proficiency.
Why the disparity? One key difference is literacy. FSI students, often highly
educated diplomats, enter with strong native language literacy skills—reading,
writing, reasoning. DLI students, many of them young soldiers with less
academic preparation, often do not. Literacy is a quiet but powerful gatekeeper
to higher levels of language achievement.
For me, literacy in English began
early and flourished naturally. I began writing poetry in third grade—not for a
school assignment, but because it was fun. By fifth grade, I was writing
serialized mysteries starring my classmates, which passed hand to hand across
the classroom, encouraged by a teacher who delighted in each page. Our family
was poor, raised on what we grew and preserved ourselves, but my father—who
never finished high school—dedicated one room of our rambling farmhouse to what
we proudly called the library. Lined with classics, it became my passport to
the world.
Even as a child, my reading
included more than English authors. I devoured translations of Goethe, Racine,
Dante, and others. By the time I met them again in their original languages,
they were old friends. This literary fluency created a natural bridge to Latin,
Spanish, French, German, and Russian, the languages I studied during my elementary
and high school years. They never felt foreign—just like extensions of a
familiar landscape.
Public speaking became another
pillar of my language foundation. In high school, I participated in debate,
extemporaneous speaking, and even appeared on a local radio talk show. This
engagement with spoken English deepened my understanding of how language works
in real time—how words, tone, and timing build meaning.
As a university student, I added
linguistics, my ultimate undergraduate major, to the mix, which not only
provided tools for language analysis but pushed my literacy to a professional
level. I joined the Penn State public speaking team, where my New England
accent became a performance liability. The Chair of the English Department, a
specialist in phonetics, offered to help. Every Thursday afternoon for over a
semester, she trained me one-on-one, guiding me through vowel, consonant, and
diphthong shifts from my regional dialect to the then-standard “John American”
used by national broadcasters. Those sessions expanded my sound inventory and
taught me how to “hear” and reproduce new sounds—an invaluable skill when
acquiring foreign phonologies.
Courses in historical linguistics
and dialectology added deeper insight. I learned why my mother’s family from
northern parts known as “down Maine” (so called because the rivers in that part
of the country flow down from the mountains in a northerly direction) et
eggs, while my father’s family from southern Maine ate them.
Understanding linguistic evolution and regional variation—particularly in my
own background—made it easier to accept unfamiliar structures in other
languages without needing everything to be explained.
Beyond the classroom, I read
insatiably in English and in other languages. Old English and Middle English
texts—Chaucer, Beowulf, Shakespeare—gifted me with tolerance for
ambiguity. Language changes. Meaning unfolds slowly. You don’t always need to
understand everything to communicate something.
That tolerance became essential
when learning languages as an adult. I could plunge into conversations or texts
even when I lacked complete grammar or vocabulary. I had the confidence and the
skillset to “swim,” even in deep, uncertain waters. Literacy gave me the
courage to try.
Today, it’s what lets me navigate
languages I’ve never formally studied. I’ve gotten by in dozens of
languages—sometimes by reading, sometimes just by listening. In Finland, signs
posted in both Finnish and Swedish gave me a foothold. I used my general literacy
in Germanic languages—German, Plattdeutsch, Yiddish, and of course English—to
decipher Swedish, which helped me acquire enough Finnish to navigate my stay.
My attempts were not always perfect, but they were understood. Sometimes they
even sparked a laugh from a bus driver or clerk who recognized the effort.
At last count, I can read in over
50 languages and understand broadcasts in about half that number—often without
having studied them. That ability comes from literacy. Literacy built the
scaffolding. It trained my mind to decode, to compare, to question and
tolerate, and most of all, to believe that language—even unfamiliar
language—was never beyond reach.
For more posts about language learning, click HERE.
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