Languages at school

First and foremost, it must be one in which there is the chance to offer sound educational experience. If proficiency as well as educational benefits are the aim, then the essentials are a personally warm, well-trained teacher with excellent proficiency in the language, and the chance to employ more good teachers as the program develops.

There is also need for material resources, especially the means to escape the confines of the classroom and enter at least a virtual world of the new language through interactive computer technology.

Principals and teachers who are proud of achievements but do not treat good language students as exceptional, are critically important, and a positive attitude inside the school - language displays at Reception, for example - is almost tangibly influential.

But the most powerful boost to learner motivation and opportunity comes from meaningful language use through relationships with in-country sister schools conducted by email and actual visits. Both due to initial impact and because they provide the means for development, these can be exceptionally motivating and useful. However, success is not automatic: exchanges work best when linked to jointly created, real activities (school work, music, sport …), not just tied to language learning on its own, and, like other successful human relationships, they need to be monitored and wisely directed.

Australians, who through heritage or interest have some proficiency in a language other than English, are recognised to have a right to study it formally, and for this reason, and in order to maintain the precious linguistic wealth of the country, Victoria and New South Wales provide the full range of accredited school study in more than 40 languages in Saturday programs.

This is a situation unparalleled anywhere, and it leaves educators around the world gasping in awe and admiration. Why? Because, first, it prevents sudden identity rupture between the old and the new for those families involved, which is socially stabilising for them and everyone else; and, second, because it maintains their access to the linguistic and cultural wealth of the societies where the language is now and has historically been used.

This gives Australia access to the quite fantastic storehouse of human knowledge, artistic creation, ways of being, forms of expression, and so on, developed by a huge number of the diverse range of human beings who have ever lived.

Obstacles to development

Solid blocks to progress in language learning development in Australia include:

1. Public attitude: gasps at Rudd's proficiency in two languages which thousands of children and adults in Australia can match are pathetic and backhandedly damaging. The business community pays almost no attention to language skills, even where these might better protect its interests. To recognise bilingualism as an advance over English-only requires a cognitive and emotional change. Pain in the colonial superiority nerve is a key negative incentive to this occurring.
    
2. Despite having as good an educational rationale as mathematics, language study lacks maths' political clout, largely due to being diffused across more than a dozen languages, many of which find themselves in competition with one another inside schools.
    
3. Lack of continuity from primary to secondary study often necessitates switching language or the boredom of repeating everything from scratch.
    
4. At university, with noble exceptions, the intellectual challenges of language teaching are poorly understood, the field generally despised among academics, and languages not well taught.
    
5. Student language teachers are taught together, so little or no work is done on the challenges of a specific language, nor on the different preparation needs for work both inside and outside the classroom of (i) those teaching their mother tongue, who do not know the demands it makes on learners and who may have difficulty relating to Australians, and (ii) locals who understand the learning demands and the school relationships, but are still not fully proficient in the language.

Diversity of linguistic and cultural knowledge means community wealth, but language study offerings cannot be left entirely to market forces. The decline of Indonesian is very much the result of parents deciding that it will not provide jobs opportunities in the (short term) future. But it is in all our interests that Australia has some people who know the language and think of the 230 million people who live next door; just as it is going to be in our collective interest that more people, than there are at present, know and understand China; just as it is essential that there be some in the community who can read mottoes like Vires Acquirit Eundo which adorn our cities, and the historical documents that form the base of our civilisation.

The government ensures the nation's Olympic strength. Government direction is also needed to ensure the nation's language strength meets its needs.