Why do we have so many students failing or struggling with their first Spanish class?

I taught Spanish 1 in a middle school for seven years and Spanish 1 in a public high school for several years. I have never seen so many students failing or struggling to pass a level 1 language class across different school counties.


After many years of observing this trend, I started asking myself, why do we have so many students failing or struggling with their first Spanish class? I came to the conclusion that our students have built two barriers in their mind: The negative stereotype against certain Spanish-speaking, minority groups; and the lack of language classes at early age.

We have to educate our children about the importance of learning a second language, especially Spanish. We have 392 million Spanish-speaking people in 22 countries in the world. Even though the U.S is not part of this group, the U.S has almost 45 million Spanish-speaking people making it the number three in the world, just after Mexico and Colombia. This means, we have more Spanish-speaking people in the U.S than the rest of the Spanish-speaking countries.

By 2050 the largest economies in the world will be as follows: China, United States (Spanish spoken by the majority), India, Brazil (Spanish spoken by all), and Mexico (Spanish only); Business magazine.

We don’t have control over the globalization trends, but we do have control over helping our children to get the language classes at early age.

Our goal in World Language is to help your children to be successful in their language journey. We help them to develop their listening and speaking abilities with games, music, art, and hands-on activities; in addition, we have created a new two-hour program to prepare your 4th and 5th graders. This class will help your children with reading, writing and grammar, so they are not part of the failing or struggling groups later on their academic life. We hope to motivate them enough so they want to continue their studies of a second language until they actually become bilingual.

We live in a small world now; our children will have to compete with students all over the world. Don’t wait until is too late.