Too few keen to speak in tongues

LANGUAGE studies are still struggling to attract students, despite a Mandarin-speaking Prime Minister.

THERE is a lot of talk about language programs in Australia, but the conversation does not appear to be going anywhere. Decades after it began, we remain solidly, some would say stolidly, monolingual.

Worse for the tertiary sector, say language experts, is that students who sign on to study a language in first year university mostly arrive with no previous experience.

This is bad for two reasons.

The first is they have not studied a language at school in case it drags down the final marks, which they need to maximise university entrance scores; the second is that without experience in learning a language at school, tertiary study is much tougher.

Kevin Rudd sparked hope with the budget which fulfilled Labor's election promise to allocate $62.4 million over the next three years to the National Asian Languages and Studies in Schools program, which focuses on Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian and Korean. But we have been here before.

In 1987, the Hawke government adopted Joe Lo Bianco's National Policy on Languages. It was a comprehensive plan for teaching English, indigenous and foreign languages, at all levels, from pre-school to university and beyond.

In 1992, the Keating government introduced the Australian Language and Literacy Policy. In 1994, there followed the $220million Council of Australian Government's National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools Strategy. This was based on a report, Asian Languages and Australia's Economic Future, by Rudd, then a public servant. The four languages identified above were selected by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

The Howard government cut the NALSAS funding in 2002, only to introduce its own National Plan for Languages Education in Australian Schools 2005-08 in 2005.

Lo Bianco, professor in language and literacy education at the University of Melbourne, warns that although Rudd's most recent commitment is a good sign, it is not enough to depend on the education system, whether it be primary, secondary or tertiary level, to produce a mass of second or third language speakers.

"People always reinvent the wheel in this area," Lo Bianco says resignedly. "There were programs in Indonesian in the 1960s and the University of Sydney was teaching Japanese in 1907. The interest in Asian languages did not start in the past couple of years."

"The main repositories of bilingualism in Australia are immigrant and Aboriginal communities, and individual enthusiasts." But the enthusiasts do not pass on what they have learned at school to their children and he characterises bilingualism as a "very fragile" skill that can disappear in a generation.

So he is disappointed that the languages debate has narrowed to a discussion of which foreign tongues should be taught and how, and that it is primarily linked to trade and geopolitical concerns.

But even those apparently limited criteria have not been enough to simplify the issues and achieve success. The Group of Eight leading universities issued a report just more than a year ago which pointed out that the number of languages taught in universities had dropped from 66 to 29 since 1997.

Other statistics are equally arresting: only 13 per cent of Year 12 students graduate studying a second language, compared to 40 per cent three decades back when it was a prerequisite for university entry.

Peter White and Richard Baldauf, co-authors of the 2006 study Re-Examining Australia's Tertiary Language Programs: A Five-Year Retrospective on Teaching and Collaboration, found numbers were generally up, albeit off a low base.

There were 1663 students of Mandarin in 2005, up by 632 since 2001. French students were up by 512 to 1414, Spanish by 248 to 924. Japanese, still the most popular course, had 102 more students, with a total of 2183. Arabic and Russian numbers were up, off a low base, but the number of students of Indonesian was down, from 641 to 540. Their previous highest enrolment had been in 1994, with 690.

"The whole area is fraught with difficulty," says White, who is based at the University of Queensland. "Unless there is some kind of incentive for students to take language at a tertiary level, they will not.

"A further difficulty is staff attrition. The age of university languages teachers is rising."

He argues for more liaison between schools programs and universities, but is gloomy about the limited space in what he characterises as overcrowded curriculums in primary and secondary schools.

Then there is the problem of who will teach languages. "I think 'lamentable' is a good way of describing it," says Elizabeth Kleinhenz, ACER senior research fellow in the Teaching Learning Leadership Research Program, referring to teacher education.

"A major problem was that teachers were coming out of teacher education courses without the basic skills.

"The native speakers tended to have a good knowledge of the language, but schools and principals were saying they did not have the pedagogical skills, and the non-native speakers had a lack of proficiency. It was difficult to find someone with both."

Existing programs are not delivering enough skilled teachers, she says, because if they are training 10 people, they may come from eight or nine language backgrounds.

"You cannot run a class in how to teach a particular language, you have to run a generic class. The trouble is that ways of teaching vary depending on the language being taught.

"For example, teaching 'character' languages, such as Chinese, is different from teaching, say, French."

University of South Australia applied linguistics professor Tony Liddicoat acknowledges the problems but counsels against trying to pick language winners.

"It is always a problem for Australia because it depends on where you think things are going and that's always very hard to predict," he says. "There has often been a flavour of the month in language learning in Australia."

He endorses the view of Lo Bianco and others that what is required is ability in a number of languages, including community languages.

"When the amount of language learning is low, we should not be pushing kids from one language into another, we should be expanding language learning in general," Liddicoat says.

But Australia does need a consistent, prolonged commitment. Liddicoat says: "One of the problems with Mandarin or any language is you do not create a language teacher overnight."

Which leaves language academics with one further paradox.

"Australians think knowing a language is important, but they do not think studying a language is important for them," Liddicoat says.

This is not helped by what he calls the prejudice against languages in schools. "Another thing we pick up is that kids at school are rarely advised to study a language, they are told they need to focus on maths and science to get into university and language is a luxury rather than central to the future of the student," he says.

But Liddicoat sees potential for improvement. "I think it's significant that we have a Prime Minister who actually speaks another language and knows the advantage of being able to communicate directly with people from another country. I think Australians can see some benefits of that when the Prime Minister appears on TV in China speaking in Chinese. The Prime Minister can only do it in one language, we need Australians who can represent our country in a range of languages."