Call to drop Chinese lessons for Year 12

AUSTRALIA should give up its failed experiment in teaching Chinese to Year 12 students, according to a Chinese studies expert  

AUSTRALIA should give up its failed experiment in teaching Chinese to Year 12 students and focus on earlier years of schooling where interest is strong, according to Chinese studies expert Hans Hendrischke.

On latest estimates, just 3 per cent of Year 12 students take Chinese and 94 per cent of these are of Chinese background.

Unable to compete, most students from non-Chinese backgrounds drop out well before Year 12 so their university entry score does not suffer from a low mark.

Professor Hendrischke, director of the Confucius Institute at Sydney University, says educators should accept the realities of student choice.

"(We should) encourage students to pursue systematic language learning up to Year 10 when interest is still very strong, then acknowledge the preference of many students to discontinue during Year 11 and Year 12, and re-engage them actively with language study at tertiary level," he says in a submission to the Asian Century white paper under ex-Treasury chief Ken Henry.

He told The Australian that the policy focus on Year 12 and its dispiriting statistics obscured "the success that the system has had up to Year 10".

In NSW, for example, there were just 634 pupils taking Chinese in Year 12, compared with 5614 in the rest of secondary and 17,197 in primary.

Professor Hendrischke, who used to run the Chinese program at the University of NSW, said he had wtinessed students able to quickly reactivate their learning of Chinese at university after a few years' hiatus.

But educator Jane Orton, who is campaigning for fairer streaming of classes in Chinese, said Professor Hendrischke's idea would be counterproductive. "A school subject that stops at Year 10 is a hobby subject -- all kids and teachers know that," she said.

"Why bother? If you can do Latin right through, if you can do Italian right through, why choose a language in Year 7 that is a known dead end?''

Dr Orton, who runs the Chinese Teacher Training Centre at the University of Melbourne, argued study of Chinese in Year 11 and 12 could be made attractive if education authorities found the will to stream classes properly.

Clumsy streaming, based on time spent in a Chinese-speaking country, allowed pupils from Chinese-speaking homes to enrol in Year 11 and Year 12 classes intended for second-language learners, she said.

This demoralised students from non-Chinese backgrounds and though those who spoke Chinese at home got easy marks towards university entry they learned nothing.

In a speech on Asian literacy last week, former prime minister Kevin Rudd touched on the vexed issue of fairness.

"There is the real question of the adequacy of curriculum and the fairness of assessment systems both at the high school and university levels when it comes to comparing native and non-native speakers, including the proper classification of non-native speakers who may only have partial fluency," he said.

"Many Australian students, their teachers and their parents are often discouraged by the ability of their children to get a decent grading in an Asian language taken to year 12 level, particularly when these gradings may count to university entry."

Professor Hendrischke said his plan offered a way around  the complexities of senior high school streaming.

"It's close to impossible to find a (streaming) structure that does justice to everyone,'' he said.

"It's not only the non-background speakers who get pushed out." For example, Chinese background speakers who grew up in Australia might feel at a disadvantage to recently arrived Mandarin speakers.

For his idea to work, universities would have to show some flexibility in allocating to classes learners who had stopped at Year 10. Some universities allocated automatically according to Year 12 results.

As well, universities and other tertiary providers should offer language courses in adult education mode to high school graduates or university students keen to pursue this in parallel to their formal study.