Languages: our primary failing

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.