While I do admit that the intentions in the Siskin article are good, I am not sure that I completely agree with what he says or how he gathered his data. First, while much can be learned from questioning undergraduate students such as Siskin did, we must take into consideration the fact that these students are at the end of their sequence of language classes (39). Over the course of three or four semesters can we not assume that several strong biases will have been drawn for their respective language. In particular, I do not find that the responses to societal perceptions are surprising. On page 58, Siskin discusses many instances of stereotyping, which I have even seen in second semester French classes. The stereotypes of the French that were put forth by the students of Spanish seem to be those of Americans in general. I do not feel that we can make a judgment between the two languages based on these stereotypes. In F150 we devoted a large portion of an entire lesson to breaking down some of these stereotypes. Even after extended study of the language, some of these stereotypes could still be present in the L2 learner of French.
A second thing is that Siskin takes into account the fact that students find the language. While I do feel that this perceived difficulty could influence the choice of enrollment, however unless these students have taken classes in both French and Spanish, how valid can these difficulty assessments be?
This brings me to the point that I believe this experiment could be more effective if it questioned high school age students or even college freshman who had not been exposed to a language class and who had to choose between several different language options. This seems relevant since the article focuses on the falling enrollments in French classes.
Something that I feel could be helpful in curbing the falling enrollments would be to talk to students before they actually enroll in language classes. Many students do not actually think about the language they sign up for, or if they do they may make their decisions based on what their friends or doing or what they have heard about the languages and this could be ill-informed. Enrollment could be helped if we made students aware of the usefulness of French and its far reach in the world.
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You make a good point that it's really at the high school level where these attitudes need to be addressed. And it's not only that high school students' perceptions of French need to change, but also those of the faculty and staff at the high schools. As you said in another post, your guidance counselor advised you to take Spanish over French because of its utility. I'm guessing that's not all that uncommon, so perhaps we need to reach out to high school professionals as well. This also means reaching out to college students who are getting degrees in education and K-12 administration. In fact, I wonder if those aren't the departments we should be looking to first for language requirement reforms (I have no idea what kinds of language requirements they have).
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