Languages: our primary failing

My 14-year-old daughter said to me yesterday, talking about her current school language learning experience: “He’s taught me more French in one term than the amount of Chinese I learnt at my old school in three years.”

I was both excited and pained at this as it illustrates two things which are emblematic of many children’s experiences of languages in school. First, she is aware of some notion of progress that she has found in her early high school languages experience and which was lacking in her primary/middle languages experience (arguably, rigour and expectations). Second, I’m dismayed that in three-plus years of primary/middle school language education my daughter has come away with next to no language - oh, she can say hamburger in Chinese, which is odd since she’s vegetarian. This begs the question why such a disparity between primary and secondary languages.

If we start with some statistics we find that in 2007 Australian 9-11 year-olds spent a meagre 1 per cent of school instruction time on modern languages (OECD Education at a Glance 2007). This was the lowest percentage for the OECD countries listed. Luxembourg rated the highest percentage (21 per cent), with many other countries dedicating more than 10 per cent to modern languages (13 per cent - Czech Republic and Spain; 12 per cent - Sweden; 11 per cent - Israel, Portugal and Slovenia; 10 per cent - France, Germany and Greece).

The OECD average is 7 per cent and the EU19 average is 9 per cent. Notably, the other predominantly anglophone countries represented either had no data (England), data that weren’t relevant (New Zealand and Scotland) or unavailable data (United States). Clearly, my daughter had no chance of getting far with languages occupying 1 per cent of instructional time.

Another stunning fact that the OECD Education at a Glance data for 2007 revealed was that Australia dedicates 41 per cent of instructional time (for 9-11 year-olds) to the compulsory core curriculum while the OECD average is 92 per cent. In Australia the majority of children’s time is spent on “compulsory flexible curriculum”. Whatever this “compulsory flexible curriculum” may be, it seems clear that this is causing the oft-invoked crowding of the primary curriculum (viz. the Australian Primary Principals’ Association Charter on Primary Schooling).

These data clearly show that our performance in languages in (upper) primary school is appalling but, more significantly, that the core curriculum in primary school is overshadowed by other activities.

Joe Lo Bianco’s article in this feature pointed to a study in the US which links successful completion of university degrees in the minimum time to schooling characterised as having “rigorous” curriculum. The definition of a rigorous curriculum always included continuous high-level language study. These OECD data suggest that Australian schooling in the upper primary years is a far cry from the rigorous curriculum required for later educational success. For languages this is patently obvious with only 13 per cent of students progressing through school to languages at year 12.

How have our primary schools gotten into such a state? And why are primary languages programs so unsuccessful?

The issue of rigour is closely related to the notion of expectations as eloquently put by Karen Woodman. I want to build on this idea and suggest that expectations of language learning in primary education are skewed towards a perspective which holds no respect for small children as language users and which inappropriately applies an adult language learning framework to children’s language learning.

Here are some uncontroversial facts:

• the majority of children learn a language in the first five years of their lives;
• they learn this language with very little error correction and often very little explicit instruction;
• by the age of five they have a basically intact adult grammar (obviously the same cannot be said of lexicon); and
• some children simultaneously acquire more than one language in this period without evident cognitive disruptions.

Joe Lo Bianco notes that many children starting school in Australia have to un-learn languages and then re-learn a “foreign” language. Not only is this the case, but the approach to teaching these “foreign” languages ignores the fact that young children are already expert linguists, have already internalised the complexity and messiness of one or more human languages (for this reason, I strongly oppose the generalisation of artificial languages like Esperanto) and are not weighed down with all of the psychological issues that obstruct adult language learning.

While children may take longer to learn languages than adults (Jane Orton points out the young adults are the most successful classroom learners of languages), the fact remains that languages learnt in childhood stick, while those in adulthood rarely do. Primary languages programs fail precisely because of a focus on classroom instruction. So what can we do?

Language policy in the pre-primary and primary years needs to be more closely aligned with the processes of child language acquisition. We need to be smarter about harnessing the language resources of our children and their communities. Our pre-schools and primary schools need to start teaching across the curriculum in languages other than English.

I’ve argued before that any content area taught in schools can be offered in other languages. I agree that languages as they are currently offered in schools can be seen as crowding the curriculum. But what if maths, sport, science, history, cooking, media, and so on, were seamlessly integrated into the primary curriculum in Arabic, Chinese, Dyirbal, Urdu, etc. Languages would then immediately fade as a curriculum crowder. I can hear a lot of people raising alarm at the notion of teaching “content” in other languages. I would argue that the issue is expectations.

Children are capable of far more than the limiting expectations adults place on them. An anecdote: I was in Italy in January this year and visited a primary school in Prato, Tuscany. The school was your regular inner city Italian primary school. My younger daughter is seven and in year 2 in Melbourne and I happened to spend two days in a similar class in this Italian primary school. I was gobsmacked. Every student in the class could write, in cursive script.

I witnessed a lesson of Italian grammar (bear in mind that these were Italian native speaker students) in which the teacher asked questions like “Who can give me a sentence with a qualificative adjective?” Most students put up their hands. One was chosen and gave the sentence “The house is red”.

An in-depth discussion followed about parts of speech, verbs, and so on. And I mean a discussion, not a lecture from the teacher. The students were switched on and participating. There were all sitting up at their desks and alert. Not only could they all write but they could all read as well.

At that time, my daughter’s handwriting was a jumble of upper and lowercase letters and her reading was quite sluggish. Her handwriting has improved after I started guiding her. I asked her what she was told about writing at school and she said “nothing”. Similarly, her reading has taken off due to concerted efforts at home.

I enquired about the level of the class and was told that the children were normal, actually a bit slower than usual. My point here is not that Italy is better but that the expectations that children will be able to do certain things drive outcomes.

If you ask anybody on the street when is the best time to learn something, I’m convinced they’ll say when you’re a child. As the Jesuits reputedly said “give me a child until seven …” Children are like sponges. We should surround them with language and help them to soak it up. We need to stop wringing the language out of them when they get to school and then expecting them to thrive in programs that are marginalised and occupy 1 per cent of instructional time.

It’s almost as if our education system is the wrong way up. If we have strong confident multilingual primary students, this can only lead to gains in secondary, tertiary and beyond. Instead of trying to play catch up by suggesting that we offer a sanitised international language that lacks all the untidiness which makes languages captivating and breathtaking, we need to look at things differently. The best, longest-lasting learning of languages happens in children, we need to start from here.