The BVN World Language department offers three languages: Chinese, Spanish and French. All of these courses go up to honors and AP levels, and they also offer honors societies for students to participate in.
Spanish teacher and foreign language department head, Sonia Carenas, explained why taking a foreign language course is beneficial for students at BVN.
“They can take [a foreign language] for college credit through Johnson County… if they take it in Spanish five or Spanish six, they get up to 13 hours of college credit. So that’s a lot, almost a minor in Spanish,” Carenas said.
In addition to college credit, taking a foreign language can open future opportunities when students join the workforce or travel.
“We have such a global environment and we don’t live in bubbles anymore and we have to communicate with other people and a lot of times… we may have an online job, we have to communicate with other countries and in our country, obviously, we have a big population of people that speak Spanish,” Carenas said.
Sophomore and Honors Chinese student Hannah Chan discussed how learning a second language has helped her.
“[Knowing a second language] definitely helps me with traveling,” Chan said.
In addition to learning a second language, Chan is in an honors world language class.
“[The honors Chinese class] move[s] at a faster pace and we use different structures,” Chan said.
Carenas explained how the world language honors programs have changed throughout the years as well as how they run now.
“The requirements in every honors society in our department does it differently, but in the past it used to be just what your GPA was you could get in and now there’s things you have to do, and there’s activities you have to do outside of class and participate in things in the community is part of that,” Carenas said.
Chan explains how her experience in taking a world language class has been.
“[My world language experience at BVN]’s been good. I’ve learned a lot of new words and situations that I could use the language in,” Chan said.
Carenas described how the different world language courses offered at BVN differ as well as how they are similar.
“We have the same curriculum so not much [differs]. The kids what they’re doing in French, they’ll be doing the same thing in Spanish, it’d just be in a different language. So the curriculum, it’s the same across all the languages,” Carenas said.
Besides for job resumes and college applications, learning a second language can be helpful in all aspects of life as a citizen of a world with many different languages.
“[Knowing a second language is helpful for] being able to travel, have travel opportunities, be more connected in your community, because there’s going to be people that speak that language that you can connect with. So it just kind of puts you ahead and just makes you more of a global citizen.”
