PTAA Texas School District STEAM-Focused Charter School District

Foreign Languages

Spanish and Mandarin Chinese are taught to provide an understanding of other cultures and a global education. With the right preparation, many of today’s students will work for companies that operate and compete in a global marketplace; some may even have opportunities to work overseas themselves. We also recognize that our lives are enriched, and we are better prepared to participate in our democracy by learning more about the diverse cultures found in our own communities.  A globalized education gives students a generous amount of exposure to the rest of the world, with a goal of equipping them to take advantage of emerging economic opportunities.  Knowledge of English, Spanish and Mandarin together will provide an incomparable advantage to our future leaders at the college and global levels.

A rising number of employers prefer individuals who can speak Spanish fluently. With 329 million native speakers, according to Ethnologue, Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language in the world after English.  Hispanic culture, language, and influence is already so vastly spread, that it has become part of the western culture. Spanish,then, offers great opportunities to practice and be immersed, if you’re not immersed already. Speaking Spanish also opens up more opportunities for travel and immersion outside of your home, from Central and South America, to Europe.Since Spanish skills are highly transferable to other languages, such as Portuguese, Italian, and French, learning Spanish provides the learner increased access to the five most widely spoken Romance languages (800 million speakers).

The curriculum used for Mandarin is Better Chinese. Mandarin is now the official language in China and Taiwan and is used by most of the Chinese schools, colleges and universities, as well as their TV programs, movies, and radio stations. Mandarin is also one of the six official languages in the United Nations. For more information about the Better Chinese curriculum, see the related links on the left.

Trilingual Education – In middle school, PTAA’s intent is to offer Latin in the future. Latin provides the root words for all the modern sciences, is the language of law, politics, logic and theology, is the easiest way to learn English grammar, and is the mother tongue of Western Civilization.