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Various education and school issues in Poland. Opinions, stories, controversies. [1006]
The problem, and scarcely limited to Communist-Era Poland, was that all foreign language instructors weren't native to the country whose language they were teaching, be it English, French or German (Russian being perhaps the exception).
In the US, most "elite" high schools, colleges, universities, generic language centers, will typically INSIST on their foreign language teaching staff being native speakers. For this reason, the quality of such instruction is usually on a high level.
Why Americans as a whole stink at learning other languages is therefore hardly due to the quality of teaching as much as the age at which serious and thorough language acquisition begins!
In certain Northern countries such as the Netherlands or the Scandinavian countries and contemporary Germany, English is taught essentially from the first form/grade on, allowing the pupils to grow up with English as though it were their mother's milk.
Although in truth, the teachers may not all be native English speakers, unlike with languages here in the US, the former are bombarded daily with English, especially American English, from the Internet, the radio, and TV.
While this doesn't guaranty necessarily "good" English, it does expose them to this subject nearly at the same time as they are acquiring their mother tongue.
