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[farm_boy]

Jersey Jay said:

"It would seem that she already figured out that you don't learn Spanish is a classroom"

Actually, her point was that the teachers at my university are bad.

In fact, ask almost any American about their Spanish classes.  They didn't learn anything because all their teachers were bad.

It's always the teachers' fault.

[jerseyjay]

Well, most Spanish teachers aren't that good. Nor are most Spanish students. At least where I grew up, at least 80 per cent of the population had taken several years of Spanish in secondary school. And almost nobody could speak it, unless they had some family or other reason to actually learn it. Of course, everybody I know who grew up in Toronto has also taken French for several years, and nobody has really learnt it either. And when I lived in Latin America, a similar percentage of people had taken English classes with similar results.

[notaprof]

College students have had it as a subject for 13 years in K-12 and many still can't speak proper English or write it well but they can communicate with it. 

I studied French for 4 years in high school, was a French major in college and had near perfect grades in the subject, but I can barely speak a word.  There were no opportunities to use French in real life in my state.  I studied Spanish intensively for six weeks (no English allowed for 8 hours per day) and there are opportunities to use it around here, and I speak much better Spanish than I do French (which is not saying much if you read the first part of this) but I can use it to communicate.  Language has to be used in normal, everyday life, not in contrived discussions, or most people don't reach fluency.  Some learning environments have recreated "normal everyday life" and I have seen people make amazing strides in learning the language that way but one hour per day in a class does not cut it for learning to speak a language.  Language is not a subject that you can cram your head full of and "know" it, it has to flow in your ears and out of your mouth to know it.  If you keep it inside your head, it does you no good.   My French is locked inside my head.

[concordancia]

It turns out that most people have never pointed out to language students that this is a skills course, at least as much as a content course. Just like learning to play an instrument, you have to practice everyday. Class time can introduce new skills and help you refine your skills, but the only way you can improve is by practice. While real life situations are ideal, even dedicating an hour a day to practicing the class material would guide most to being able to communicate. I have heard mixed reviews about Rosetta Stone from native speakers (the Dutch is evidently atrocious), but if you spend an hour a day with a program like that, you will be able to get by.

One problem at colleges with lower admissions standards is that numerous studies have shown that for adult learners, higher skills in the native language translate into picking up a second language better. Reading is one of the best forms of practice, but if students have poor reading skills in their native language, they aren't going to magically become high level readers by having strange words put in front of them. If students have a hard time with subject-verb agreement in English, they are going to have a hard time with languages that require a different verb conjugation for each subject...

[researcher009]

The higher the tuition, the more students will look at it as a financial investment and expect solid financial returns.