Page 147 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 13 February 2008
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Elements of that plan as put by the forum included the establishment of a school of languages along the lines of such schools in other states, and I look forward to the government’s announcement on that; supporting existing bilingual programs from preschool upwards and their continuation into secondary level; the recruiting and training of language teachers; and greater connections between school and community resources.
I should point out that the recent commitment of some extra money for languages education was welcomed by the forum but it was also acknowledged that the ACT’s new curriculum framework would not make language learning one of its essential learning achievements. These are the two core issues: the ambition of the curriculum framework and the level of resources. I need first to congratulate the ACT government and the education systems of the ACT for putting together and publishing Every chance to learn, the curriculum framework document that provides a framework for 25 essential learning areas.
However, I believe we have been let down when it comes to languages. The essential learning achievement where we can find languages, if we look, is entitled “the student communicates with intercultural understanding”. As I have already argued, language sits at the heart of culture and at the heart of intercultural understanding. It is very disappointing then that at this stage few ACT schools are really committed to meaningful language education. It is true that all children in ACT schools are likely to learn a few words in another language. But by early adolescence they will no longer be expected to speak or read anything in other languages but simply to know about them.
I think I have already said in this place that my daughter was exposed to something like six years of Japanese at Yarralumla Primary School and at the end of that I think she might have been able to say hello and goodbye, and she did know a lot more about Japanese culture, which is helpful. But, as Mrs Dunne said, a semester of a concerted program that is part of the curriculum in high school would have given her that in a few weeks. I am not denigrating those efforts that were made, because it was important to children. I just think that, if we are going to put the resources into that, we need to use them in a way that will produce better results.
The markers of progress are more about understanding that people are different and, with a bit of luck, being respectful of others. This is in the curriculum documents. But this is too close to the usual paradigm of being nice to others who are different. There is a real weakness in the thinking here, in my view—that it still reflects a world view of just one slice of Australia. I would be interested to know if this essential learning area would be changed if it were reviewed by a team of educationalists all of whose first language was other than English. That would be a good test.
Looking more closely at the proposed additional investment in languages starting this year, it is very hard to know what will be achieved with the $300,000. The idea of spreading language teachers across a number of schools will not improve the quality of language experience for those kids, but it will alienate the teachers if they are not adequately resourced and cannot achieve results, and they will be less and less likely to stick with that work. Already a high proportion of our language teachers now teach
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