Page 148 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 13 February 2008
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something else or do not teach at all. Solving the problem of too little skilled teaching by spreading existing resources more thinly will fail.
A few online projects with kids linked up across schools is a more creative idea, but it is no substitute for teaching; it can only ever be an add-on. We have all had that passionate teacher; I certainly had a passionate French teacher when I was in year 7 and that is what made me love French. Unfortunately, she went and joined a convent at the end of my year 7, and mine was not a Catholic school, so I lost her. I am just indicating that the passion of a teacher is what really counts.
I do not want to deride this extra expenditure. It could very well be used to deliver professional development across the ACT government school system, and I support such investment, but it needs to be informed by some vision and a plan to achieve it. Languages could be the ACT’s competitive advantage. We are an international city with diverse multilingual resources, including embassies, government agencies, the campuses of four universities, strong ethnic community organisations with out-of-hours language schools, and extraordinary communication infrastructure and resources.
If we truly want languages to be taught in all our schools, let us put the evidence together as to how best to do it. Let us see how to draw on the extra resources available to us and let us give ourselves a time line for delivery. Community scrutiny of the second appropriation bill last year led me to believe that we do not have the evidence on how best to teach languages or, rather, if we have it, we are not using that evidence to inform our decisions. One hour a week—maybe it is 2½; I think there is debate around that—is most unlikely to provide the support for anyone to learn another language, and, without a school-wide commitment to building the link between that language and other school experiences, it will be even less useful.
Lots of kids end up hating language classes—as a teacher I know that—and that is usually because it is not connected to anything else they do. It becomes a time out from mainstream classes, because the language being taught and any cultures that speak it have little or no other relevance to their school or community. We can draw on these resources in Canberra to better support languages in schools. There is scope to build community connections, as the Mawson Chinese language preschool did, to draw on international connections and national resources, as we can see at Telopea, and more economically at Lyons primary school. I will speak more about that later. Of course, these three examples of language programs are bilingual or immersion programs and I am disappointed that the education minster appears to have rejected the notion of immersion, though I have now heard his announcement and I will speak about that later.
In the context of language programs around Australia, it is worth looking at the different jurisdictions, because different states do it differently, as the languages forum pointed out last year. The Tasmanian government, for instance, chose to pursue only four languages to better focus resources, and that appears to work. Some states have language schools that give language teaching a better status and support. New South Wales, on the other hand, has never taken languages particularly seriously and it looks as though we could be following in those footsteps rather than in better ones.
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