Learning languages in a classroom, oddly, is called the non-natural learning environment. It may appear to be a contradiction, but the way we learn languages naturally is by being immersed in the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of a language, not studying the abstract elements of language. Many children on camp may acquire Bahasa Indonesia before they ever enter the Indonesian Studies classroom. The best way to overcome the non-natural learning environment is by focusing the theme of study not on the language of the culture, but on its people.

There was a time when the traditional skill areas of reading, writing, listening and speaking were the core of foreign language instruction, usually vis-à-vis grammar. But in our ever shrinking world, cultural fluency is paramount in the communicative classroom. Just as verbal fluency emerges in stages, so too will cultural fluency. Learning about the myriad cultures in the world of Spanish, with nearly 500 million people in twenty-two countries from Europe, North, Central and South America to Africa and Asia, we’ll truly begin to understand the Spanish idiom Él que habla dos idiomas vale por dos (He that speaks two languages is worth two people). This is not to say that studying Spanish will make you schizophrenic; you may interpose English and Spanish or Bhasa Indonesia (or German or French or Arabic or Thai or Afrikaans or Tagalog or Vietnamese or Mandirin or Bahasa Malaysia or Korean in our school community!) but this will give rise to a great opportunity to see the connections between languages and peoples.

For a truly inspiring, even if somewhat ominous, account of the milieu of languages and cultures and their nexus in our world today, I highly recommend listening to anthropologist, author, conservationist, ethnobotanist, photographer, and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, Dr. Wade Davis.