Fabiola Franco was born and raised in Colombia and moved to the U.S. for graduate education and has lived there ever since. She’s taught Spanish at all levels for over 35 years.

Note: This contribution is a bit larger as it’s basically three contributions in one. Keep Your Language Alive! Here you will find the thoughts of three people who taught or have taught foreign languages at institutions of higher education in and out of the United States. We all have in common the joy of knowing at least two languages: English and Spanish. We all regard a language as a wonderful gift to be kept and improved as long as we live. Finally, we all face realities that could lead us to forget one of our languages but fight in different ways to keep our language knowledge. We hope that this contribution helps someone. Alexandra was born in New York from an American father and a Spanish mother. She moved to Spain at age 10, and later attended the University of Granada. After residing for 15 years in Spain, Alexandra returned to the United States to pursue graduate work and teach. She misses Spain but visits twice a year. “I teach Spanish to beginners and sporadically to intermediate learners”, says Alexandra. Although classes are taught entirely in Spanish, these levels of instruction restrict the instructor from free, advanced communication. Her favorite method to keep her Spanish alive consists of taking advantage of all the possibilities that technology has to offer. She spends two to three hours a day reading newspapers and listening to music. Although we may call her method passive, it can be very effective, she affirms. It is not always easy to find people and friends who can or have the time to communicate using native and/or advanced Spanish. Estela is from Argentina a retired professor of English who lives in Mendoza and has an extended family of over thirty Spanish-speaking members. Recently, Estela visited the United States and one couldn’t help noticing her constant reluctance to speak English. Suspecting that her shyness to communicate orally would relate to the main theme of this very article, I decided to call her and ask: “Estela, what do you do to keep yourself from abandoning your second language?” Her response came with no hesitation: I was becoming very worried and sad about losing the oral competency in the language I studied throughout my life. After a close examination of my personal situation, my decision was to maintain only two of my English language skills: reading and understanding of the spoken word. Reading, in my opinion, is the most efficient way to keep and improve a language. From an early age, I’ve been reading European and Asian literature in English. Right now, I read literature originally written in Spanish in their English translation, such as the works of Gabriel García Márquez, Neruda, Vargas Llosa, and the Classics. I also try to keep my understanding of oral English by watching movies and plays on television. Again, as far as my capacity for good oral communication in English is concerned, it became too difficult to find people willing to speak English in Mendoza, a relatively small place. Living in Buenos Aires would have been different, I guess. Sometimes we have to make harsh choices. My name is Fabiola, author of this contribution. I’ve taught Spanish for over 35 years. My life has been dedicated to my profession and I have loved every minute of it. My activities to keep all aspects of Spanish at superior levels of scholarship have lasted three quarters of my life. Although English fascinates me, I don’t dare calling myself a perfect bilingual. As a linguist, I am with Saussure (the father of linguistics) who believed that being monolingual is the normal tendency of the human brain. French by birth, Saussure learned German at age five but said that his French was better than his German at some levels of scholarship. If we believe in this reality we may be less arrogant and worry less when seeing one of our language expertise decline for we can always keep trying to improve. To keep a language I listen, speak, read, and write –my writing in Spanish being far superior- I buy all kinds of dictionaries –from Oxford… to American slang. Every dictionary helps a lot. I talk when given the opportunity (in the case of English I listen more than I speak, especially when the English speaker has an excellent command of English). I make lists of new words, I ask when a Spanish speaker uses a word I never heard. I e-mail in both languages. My ex-student, Brooke keeps her German and Spanish through correspondence. She writes in English to me and I answer in Spanish. I write very well in Spanish having the patience to rewrite as many times as possible. Gabriel García Márquez used to revise and rewrite his works innumerable times before publishing. I like to read beautiful English. Finally, I travel, rewarding, and fun if we are not equally versed in two languages and as long as we keep trying to improve. When I started to teach Spanish, the need to know the countries where the language is spoken became one of my endeavors; travel provides cultural immersion. Little by little, we can visit each of the countries where the language we teach is spoken. This is not only a fun way to learn; language change is a fact of life and full immersion provides the opportunity to refresh and refine the language. It doesn’t matter if our trips are short. Even short visits allow teachers to better their language skills and gather teaching materials unavailable elsewhere. All this is possible if we approach a language and culture with an open mind. Final Note Besides stating ways to keep a language, the above shows two harsh realities that affect language: a) Isolation: b) the rapid disappearance of languages. a) In the United States of America, the present and future threaten us with isolation – no need to talk, no one to talk to, one-year-old children already versed on technology are starting to talk later than others – this is from my own observation. On August 28/2013, US Today reports from the Census Bureau:

More Americans are living alone. Living alone? You’ve got company. More than one in four households had just a single person in 2012, greater than at any time in the past century, according to new Census Bureau findings. About one in four households now have only one person One-person households triple since 1972 million Americans living alone than in 2007. World’s Languages Dying Off Rapidly. By John Noble. Published: September 18, 2007. Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguist say, nearly half are in danger of extinction and are likely to disappear in this century. In fact, they are now falling out of use at a rate of about one every two weeks. Fabiola Franco. Emerita, Macalester College.

June 6, 2014