| dc.description.abstract | As the United States becomes ever more pluralistic and globalization makes the world more closely connected, it has never been more necessary to build an educational system that helps students grow into competent world citizens who can communicate effectively in languages other than English. Despite the growth of foreign language education in the United States during the past decades, an increasing number of research articles on foreign language programs have shown that foreign language learning in U.S. K-12 public schools is still lagging behind compared to the other nations and the desired state that U.S. policymakers, educators, parents, major research organizations, business leaders, and the general public would like it to be. Among different states and different foreign languages, there are huge gaps. In addition, very little is known about the patterns by which foreign language programs diffuse and how the current patterns are formed, which can inform our understanding of the state of U.S. foreign language education and provide information for policymakers and stakeholders for schools. Building on existing research, this dissertation explores these two research questions: What factors influence the diffusion of foreign language programs in U.S. K-12 public schools, and to what extent do these factors help form the current state of foreign language enrollments in U.S. K-12 public schools? In this study, the term foreign language refers to any language other than English, though some foreign languages that are taught in U.S. schools are not foreign to the U.S. or to all students therein. Based on a review of literature on human capital theory, social and cultural capital, resource dependence, and institutional theory, this dissertation relied on various data sources to construct a state-level panel dataset for the school years of 2004 to 2005, 2007 to 2008, and 2014 to 2015, focusing on foreign language enrollments in all 50 states for U.S. K-12 public schools, and regression with random-effects using Stata, to address the stated research questions. Analysis results demonstrated that parents’ education, state policies, race, state political conservatism, and region factors have significant effects on the current state and diffusion patterns of foreign language programs in U.S. K-12 public schools. The results indicate that both parents’ education and state policies have strongly positive effects on foreign language education, even though the effects are not significant or exclusively positive on all the seven selected foreign languages which are Spanish, French, German, Latin, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. The influential power of race and state political conservatism is comparatively smaller and varies depending on different foreign language programs. In terms of percentages of foreign language enrollments, region factors also matter and showed significant effects. Further research is needed to identify factors that could help shape the within-state (such as district-level or regional level) disparities of foreign language enrollments. The research can also extend to private schools and college-level foreign language education, include a wider range of foreign languages and more forms of foreign language instruction, and explore diffusion patterns of foreign language programs in different grade levels and taking language proficiency levels into consideration. | |
