There's research showing that one year of Esperanto followed by three of French leads to greater French fluency than four years of French: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto

Those studies included tutelage in the structure of language as part of their Esperanto instruction, so the same benefit might exist simply by modifying students' language curricula.

What percentage of American high-school students who take their mandatory year of foreign language continue on to speak that language proficiently and competently? What "practical skills"?

The supposed economic value from learning modern national languages is wildly overstated, for English monolinguals. It's better to learn languages because learning languages is valuable for its own sake, and pick the language you learn simply because you like it.

There is a huge disconnect between our implicit goals for language learning in this country and the effort we expend upon it.

I strongly believe in the value of language education, but given the amount of time and money we're willing to spend on it, we'd get as much or more benefit from making them study Latin.

With Latin, all the people who want to learn a Romance language would get a leg up on it, and all the people who want to study biology would get a leg up on that, and people who are fine with just speaking English will get more insight into their own language.

Every year spent learning Latin in advance of a living language pushes the learning of that living language further out of the critical period of language acquisition.

What's wildly overstated is the benefit learning Latin has on anything other than taking the SAT. Studying French is much more beneficial to speaking French than studying Latin and I shouldn't have to explain why that is the case.

The mandatory minumum year of foreign language is already outside the "critical period hypothesis" anyway.

If you buy the critical period hypothesis anyway, which I do not.

The thing is, in this country in the last decade or two, we've seen the rise of dual-language immersion schools that are actually effective at teaching bilingualism. These are mostly English-Spanish, but there are French immersion schools in Louisiana, and indigenous language schools for Cherokee, Hawaiian, &c. This method of language education actually seems to produce children who are bilingual in both languages; they are a major advance in language education in the United States, and they should be wholeheartedly supported.

The "mandatory one year of foreign language in high school" is a relic of decades past when Latin and Greek were widely taught, and that is what they are mostly what they are suited for. It is just as much a relic as Latin is.

Another popular bilingual immersion option is English-Mandarin. I know people here in San Francisco who have kids doing bilingual Mandarin immersion, apparently with good results. I love Latin and Latin teaching, support its availability, and think it's benefited me and other students who were given the opportunity to learn Latin, but I think you're right that the recent modern-language immersion trend is incredibly valuable and deserving of support. We should want language teaching to be effective and beneficial for students.

There's nothing on the scale of full-time immersion, nor is there likely to be, but there's now a small minority of Latin teachers who are presenting Latin as a spoken language, including using Latin as the language of instruction and attempting to apply modern language pedagogical techniques like Total Physical Response. So even some Latin teachers might agree with your criticism of the less-holistic teaching styles and the distance they put between students and the language.

Edit: I didn't notice that you were also advocating teaching Latin further up in the thread.

>Every year spent learning Latin in advance of a living language pushes the learning of that living language further out of the critical period of language acquisition.

Let's be honest here - nothing of value is lost.

The opportunity costs of even one year of any non-English language for American HS students makes it simply not worth it.