Demographic and sociopolitical predictors of American attitudes towards foreign language policy

Despite the controversies over the English-only movement, bilingual education, and language and national security, there have been only sporadic studies of the state of representative public opinion on these issues. The year 2000 General Social Survey (GSS) asked seven new questions on language policy of their national probability sample of 1397 respondents aged 18 and older. A factor analysis suggested that public responses to their seven questions clustered around two distinct dimensions, one on issues associated with more restrictive views of the role of languages other than English in the United States, and the other on support for second language acquisition in high school. The five questions that tapped the dimension of the more " restrictive" FL (foreign language) attitudes varied markedly in support - from the 78% who favored making English the "official" American language to the 22% who favored elimination of bilingual education. The other two GSS questions tapped the dimension of basic support for learning a second language in high school (with 64% and 75% support). In other words, support for the two types of issues was essentially independent of each other. When two scales were constructed to measure each dimension, their appeal was found to come from notably different constituencies in the public. Older, more conservative and Republican respondents were more likely to support restrictive English-only policies, but none of these groups were significantly less favorable to teaching FL in high school. At the same time, both the pro-FL and anti-restrictive dimensions did draw more support from certain similar demographic groups - in particular, from the college-educated, from women, from non-whites, from residents of urban areas and on the coasts - and from that quarter of the GSS sample who said they were able to speak a second language. In other words, these groups were significantly both more opposed to restrictive policies toward use of non-English languages and they were significantly more supportive of taking FL courses in high schools. This held true, and almost as strongly, after statistical regression controls for the other predictors. Although levels of agreement on these questions may have shifted since 2000, a small 2005 national survey was able to replicate the existence of these two separate dimensions and the relative degrees of public support for each policy. © Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2006.