LOS ANGELES, April 9 (UPI) -- Many first-generation Vietnamese-American children who cannot speak the language of their parents are being taught Vietnamese in California schools.
The Garden Grove Unified and Huntington Beach Union school districts are offering Vietnamese classes to high school students, making Orange County one of only two counties in the nation with school districts offering Vietnamese as a foreign language elective like Spanish and French.
The language barrier had become so great that the students couldn't carry on the most basic conversations with their parents, The Los Angeles Times reported.
Experts say there has been a gradual effort to add language classes at high schools to prepare students for the global market. In Washington, D.C., Arabic is an option; Korean and Tagalog are offered in Los Angeles; and Mandarin will be offered this fall in Palo Alto, Calif.
"We learned a hard lesson after Sept. 11," said Marty Abbott, a director at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in Alexandria, Va. "We've gone into wars with Afghanistan and Iraq without understanding the language or the culture."
