We need to talk about Hindi

RANGEBANK Primary School set out to be different by choosing to teach Hindi.

RANGEBANK Primary School set out to be different but only now does principal Colin Avery realise how groundbreaking his school was in choosing to teach Hindi.

When it started teaching the language to all students from prep to Year 6 this year, Rangebank Primary, in Melbourne's southeast, became the only school in the nation to embed Hindi in its curriculum, predating the recommendations of the Asian white paper by about eight months.

"We knew about the emerging might of the economies of India and China and thought to align ourselves with India could be a smart move," Mr Avery said.

"I thought we would be groundbreaking but . . . I can't believe we were that innovative. The white paper has vindicated the direction we wanted to take."

The school was fortunate in finding a qualified teacher among its parent body. Pooja Verma, whose daughter attends Rangebank, was working casually as a primary school teacher when Mr Avery approached her, and has 10 or so years' experience teaching Hindi in primary schools in India, from where she emigrated.

Ms Verma said starting to learn a second language in primary school was a great idea, particularly in the first three years.

"It's like a mind exercise. Kids are like empty pots and whatever you fill in they can grab that. They're loving it," she said.

Elsewhere around Australia, the teaching of Hindi is very much at a nascent stage in schools. Students number in the hundreds not the thousands, and there are only about 37 Hindi teachers based in three states - Victoria, NSW and South Australia.

Queensland, Western Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory have no registered teachers or students of Hindi, and the language is taught in the ACT in a community language school but the education department was unable to provide figures.

Mandarin and Italian will be the first two languages under the national curriculum, with courses to be finalised by the end of next year. As a measure of the current priority placed on Hindi, it is not included in the first group of languages for national curriculum and is only taught at two Australian universities.

Hindi is primarily taught through community language schools and weekend language schools in NSW and Victoria. The Victorian School of Languages, employs 14 Hindi teachers, and provides classes out-of-school hours to 359 students from prep to year 12, with 62 students across years 11 and 12 studying Hindi for the VCE. In NSW, 17 students took Hindi for the HSC and there are 14 Hindi teachers in government schools and a further six in the Saturday languages school.

South Australia has three registered teachers of Hindi and about 100 students across all school years.

While the government is starting virtually from scratch to increase the students of Hindi, there is a stronger base in other Asian languages, with Japanese the most commonly taught language in Australia, ahead of Italian, with Indonesian third and Chinese sixth behind French and German.

But the Asia Education Foundation warns that numbers are dropping in all these languages, with Indonesian losing 10,000 students a year and the vast majority of students dropping the language before they reach year 12.

In Sydney, Mala Mehta has been teaching Hindi for 25 years, through the IABBV Hindi School, which is part of the education department's community languages program, teaching about 110-120 students a year from kindergarten to year 12 as well as to adults. The language is starting to branch out into mainstream schools, with West Ryde Public in northwest Sydney offering Hindi as one of three language choices to all students, and Ms Mehta started a course with 300 students in years 3 and 4 in seven primary schools around Sydney, from Cronulla in the south to Double Bay in the eastern suburbs.

Ms Mehta said effective languages teaching had to have the subject built into the curriculum, taught alongside maths, English and science, and too often was tacked on "over and above" other subjects.

"Students' futures are going to be more and more linked with Asia and with India to a large extent," she said.

Ms Mehta said she had faced resistance over the years to teaching Hindi in schools.

"People needed to be convinced that it was important. Awareness of the country is very important, and awareness of the language is very important to work with business," she said.