My wife, who grew up in Europe, can speak French. She has German too but her French is better, in no small part because she spent a happy year there between school and university. My own French is a sort of gesture. I can kind of follow it in print, I know some words but not enough to have anything more than the most rudimentary and stumbling conversation.
My version of French is a relic of 'learning' it three decades ago for two years. And damn near passing, I'll have you know. All this time later, French is still the fourth most taught language in Australian schools. German is fifth. Italian - probably the sexiest language in the world - is second. The top six actually looks like this:
1/ Japanese 302,780 students
2/ Italian 296,641
3/ Indonesian 214,760
4/ French 204,869
5/ German 128,133
6/ Chinese* 78,419
(*Chinese includes Mandarin and other, unspecified languages)
These figures are from 2005 but they're the latest available. They were included in a report for the Australian government from the Research Centre for Languages and Cultures Education at the University of South Australia. They cover the government and non-government sectors across all the years languages are taught in schools. What's wrong with that list?
Firstly, the numbers are small. Less than half of students learn a language. By the time they get to year 12, it's down to 13%. The overwhelming majority of the language teaching happens at primary school, with most program times taking less than an hour a week. No other OECD country puts in as little effort as this - in Finland all children study three languages throughout their school years.
Secondly, check out that list again. How relevant does it look, really? French is beautiful, Italian is sexy, German is not sexy but my word it is precise. There are community reasons for teaching Italian and historical reasons for teaching the other two. But that's where it ends.
This is the Asian century. By the time the five year olds beginning school now are mid-career, China and India will be (once again) two of the world's most dominant economies. Australian schooling, as it stands now, does almost nothing to prepare the kids for this.
So let's stop teaching a ridiculous 133 languages in our schools. 90% of students are doing one of the six listed above. Let's not dilute the resources in this way - let's teach six. Get all the States and Territories to agree on which six and do it. And let's make sure the six we teach reflect the geopolitical and economic realities we face. Let's make it:
1/ Mandarin
2/ Japanese
3/ Indonesian
4/ Hindi
5/ Russian
6/ One from Korean/Thai/Vietnamese
Let's work to encourage more language teachers - for starters give them HECS-free degrees in return for say four years of teaching. Let's also raise the status of languages in the rest of society - they're the key to the deep understanding of other cultures. Robin Jeffrey at the ANU has ideas on how to do both.
But here's the thing, we can have a lot more understanding for everyone (not all of our children will learn languages) by embedding Asian cultures into the rest of the curriculum - English, maths, sciences, history, geography. It can be done, it's vital that it is done and we need to start now.
There's good news and bad news about that. The bad news is that the Federal government - that would be the one headed by a Mandarin-speaking Prime Minister - is proposing to inject about $20 million a year into teaching Asian languages in high schools. That's bad news because, the old Howard government program, which was ended in 2002, tipped in about five times as much money every year.
The good news is there are some very smart people at the Asian Education Foundation and I think, gradually, they are going to win the argument.
6 comments:
Can I put in a word for Esperanto as well?
I say this not because it has become a living language, but because it has propadeutic values as well.
Detail can be found at http://www.esperanto.net
I couldn't agree more. It seems that much of the public school system (at least in NSW) has abandoned the teaching of languages.
Your primary school child might get a few cursory lessons because they are lucky enough to have a teacher with some foreign language skills, but there is no continuity at each stage to build on those early lessons.
Once at high school your child will most likely be offered minimal compulsory language hours, with no choice of different languages (in my daughter's case, it was Japanese condensed into Yr 7 with no language classes offered in Yr 8).
It seems to boil down to whether there are teachers with language skills available in your particular school, rather than any systematic approach to teaching languages throughout a child's entire schooling.
Not good enough in an era of increasing globalisation!
As a former senior education bureaucrat I consider that the current language policies which are designed to appease all language groups guarantee that very few students will learn a second language. Without narrowing the focus to 4-6 languages, phasing out the study of non-approved' languages in schools (they can be taught as community languages in community language centres), getting alignment between the languages taught in primary schools and secondary schools in a local area, establishing beginners and refresher courses for teachers in the few official languages and changing the way languages are taught/experienced (by using technology to connect to native speakers locally or overseas, developing conversation proficiency before reading and writing proficiency, whole school contribution to language learning and by backing up regular lessons with 'intensives' such as a language camp, overseas exchanges, a second language week each term, etc)- the current parlous state of second language learning will be perpetuated.
"ptr" is absolutely correct in that one of the primary reasons for lack of language learning in Australia is the lack of continuity in study (besides, of course, language study being non-compulsory; seen as one thing too many to add to an already-crowded curriculum; and the urgent need for language teacher training). As a uni lecturer in Spanish, I have (a few, lucky) students who may have had extensive hours of lang. learning with excellent teachers at primary level, but were unable to continue studying the same language at secondary level, or were thrown back into the beginners pool, only to be bored to tears reviewing what they already knew.
I would also suggest that Spanish be added to the "compulsory 4-6 languages" Richard Aedy suggests - as a Romance language, it is easier for English speakers to learn; it's the 2nd most widely spoken language worldwide with 400+ million speakers (and growing) AND, as I constantly remind my colleagues, Spanish is also a language that is used in the Asia-Pacific region, and is recognised as such by the Australian government with funding for uni students to study in Latin America. Somehow, Latin America's relevance as a trading partner and as a member of the Asia Pacific community is too often overlooked. Spanish is also one of the fastest growing and more popular languages for students to learn at unis in Australia at present.
As a teacher of a European language, I think that these comments could be very damaging to the hard work that language teachers put in. Before you question the relevance of studying a non-Asian language, you really need to check your research.
There are community reasons for studying German – apart from the large number of descendents of German immigrants in South Australia, there are other German speaking communities around the country, such as the one in Morwell, in Gippsland. And contrary to your opinion, the historical reasons for studying German, is not where the relevance ends.
German is the most widely spoken native language in the European Union. The German speaking countries form the largest and most influential market in the EU, and are Australia’s third most important trading partners. German companies also invest heavily in Australia.
Apart from these reasons, to look no further than Asia in the day of the “Global Village”, is very short-sighted. While we may be more geographically connected to Asia, we are basically a European society in Australia, whether some people like it or not. And while I agree with the point that there are not enough people studying languages in Australia, directing people away from learning European languages is not a smart move. Surely we should encouraging simply the study of languages, rather than putting forward this narrow view of the world.
Some very interesting comments here. I think the case for Spanish is fairly convincing - it's one of the most widely spoken languages in the world as well as being one of the easier ones for native English speakers to learn. Interestingly, that's exactly the position the Secondary Principal's Association has taken.
I certainly don't mean to denigrate German, or French, come to that. French is actually spoken in Australia's sphere of interest - in the south Pacific. And I take JennyR's point about German, but only up to a point.
It's possible to make a case for a large number of languages - nearly all have something going for them. The EU will argue about this, (and I speak as a Europhile), but you wouldn't put the mortgage on Europe becoming more important in Australia's future. Asia IS going to.
Not enough people learn and speak other languages and the reasons for this are difficult to address. But let's not continue to teach 130+ of them in our schools. At the moment, schools are deciding to teach languages based on community interest and the language teachers available to them. I understand that - but it isn't exactly working out well for the country, is it? We need to teach languages Australia really needs. If there really were going to be only six - and you know it'll never happen - I wouldn't have German (or French) on that list. I might have Spanish though...
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