A chara, - Michelle Lee (August 19th) stressed the increased status of Spanish vis-à-vis French, but the fact that there is a campaign to give Spanish equal status to English in the United States is not in itself a sufficient reason to favour Spanish over French.
Within Europe itself there are significantly more French than Spanish speakers - and indeed, significantly more German speakers. Much of the work carried out in the institutions of the European Union is done through French, German and English. I doubt that French is an "increasingly redundant" language. I consider it of considerably more economic interest to be able to communicate with a greater number of our neighbours, rather than centring our policy on what is happening in the United States.
This is not to dismiss the importance of teaching Spanish I raise this point purely to make it clear that I do not agree that the availability of teaching one foreign language should not be at the expense of another.
Instead of arguing over how many students are taking which languages at Leaving Certificate level, it would be more constructive to recognise that we start teaching foreign languages too late. There is no point in trying to impress on young people the importance of a particular language if we have failed to impress on them the importance of acquiring a foreign language in the first place. Most other European education systems try to give their students a command of two foreign languages. We fail to give them even one. - Is mise,
TREASA LYNCH, Swords, Co Dublin.