Languages at school

Languages in the curriculum

Learning a new language is a multifaceted educational experience which offers a range of potential benefits in and of itself, as well as providing longer term dividends in the form of mental and emotional flexibility, and the language proficiency and intercultural competence for broader social and work-related interaction.

In support of these claims, a recently published report by Victoria's Department of Education and Early Child Development (February 2008: 6-9) states:

Sustained international research on second language acquisition, bilingualism and bilingual education demonstrate that learning a second language actually enhances and enriches children's language experience, and offers them unique insights and opportunities for the development of cognitive skills which are unavailable to the monolingual learner.

Furthermore:

The development of language awareness…[is] central to education because it allows learners, uniquely, to adopt the perspective of the other, to look at their own culture from outside, to become aware that culture as a social construct is relative and not absolute … (Coleman, 1997: 7)

Although young adults (typically, tertiary level students) are the most efficient classroom learners of a language in terms of speed and proficiency, because of its important educational benefits, language learning - in which cultural understanding is an integral part - belongs in the school curriculum, and from an early age. And it is in terms of these benefits that school language programs should primarily be evaluated.

Proficiency

Some people show a flair for language learning, and little children can pick up a new language well and with virtually no accent, but immigrants everywhere continually show that people from any walk of life, and at any age, can learn a second language to a high level of proficiency.

The two most important factors for success are need and opportunity. Need means need perceived by the learner. It is generated either externally, for example when acquiring the language seems fundamental to survival, or internally, when there is a strong personal desire to learn the language. Opportunity means having frequent engagement as both listener-reader and speaker-writer in varied, good quality language events, which provide challenges but aren’t overwhelming. This allows for success while also drawing the learner on.

It is also vital to progress that, as they proceed, learners have access to information about the language and its use, and help with learning difficulties. The lack of success in achieving proficiency by large numbers of those who begin a language at school can be attributed mainly to a failure to develop and maintain a personal need for the language, combined with low opportunity to use it, even in the best of programs.

For primary school learners, who rarely have a sense of any external value in acquiring the new language, the desire to learn must be associated with the activities they are asked to use the language for.

Need and opportunity are provided by frequent, varied and realistic activities appropriate for the age group, while fairly repetitive in terms of the language involved. Only in this way will the language be both comprehended and retained.

Realistic activities involve doing something meaningful while using the language: something children are interested in that language is a normal part of, for example, singing, playing games with others, listening to stories.

Frequent means that 3 x 20 minute sessions in a week are more use than 2 x 30 minute sessions. Recent studies have shown highly significant advances in terms of quantity of language retained and successfully applied in new situations occur at primary (and at all other levels) when teacher and students combine their speech with gestures and body movement, meeting the language through narratives and mimes in the first instance, and then working on it in other ways, including formal exercises (see here).

While secondary school students may gradually begin to imagine a life for themselves beyond school, few have the plans to generate a sense of need for their second language at the time when they are starting to learn it. So these students, too, have to find language learning of value in the present - a present which may amount to just 45 minutes on a hot Tuesday afternoon in Melbourne, tucked in between phys. ed. and going home.

If that 45-minute experience is engaging, intellectually and affectively, and students feel there is a chance for them to succeed, then they are likely to stick with it despite the difficulties and tedious parts. Teachers can help students develop a sense of personal need, but to be effective, it must come from the learner's own experience. Just asserting how important the language may be in some future life only dimly visible to the teenager is unlikely to build sustained motivation.

As the secondary students who have continued with language learning say in a recent study: "I know languages are important, but that's not why I'm studying one" (Babel, Vol. 42-2: 20).

Research has also shown that even parents whose own lives model an apparently successful monolingual existence can build their child's language learning motivation by taking an interest in and sharing the child's experience with the language, through, for example, showing appreciation of the country and people whose language it is, participating in its use in the home (“Latte, Mum?” “Si.”), encouraging (not demanding!) their use of it in the community (for example, in the pizza parlour or Chinese restaurant). The killers are parents who firmly assure their children that "In our family we're no good at languages", or claim "English is all you need these days".

Language choice

The learning of any language offers the cognitive and social benefits outlined at the beginning of this article, so for purely educational purposes, putting any language on the curriculum will do, including Latin or Esperanto. However, the greater significance to the community of some living languages usually gives them priority. Hence we find the languages of our European heritage, our larger immigrant groups, and our regional neighbours and trading partners - Italian, Greek, French and German, Indonesian, Chinese and Japanese - are offered in the schools of most states.

These days the reason for offering a particular European language largely reflects historical situations (an earlier local concentration of certain immigrant groups, a religious affiliation, the international prestige of French) and as a consequence, many programs are becoming vulnerable.

Most Asian language programs were begun less than 20 years ago, under pressure from governments and parents for Australians to learn to relate to those in our region. Indonesian rose quickly among these latter, being seemingly easy to learn and the country nearby and attractive to visit. However, political unrest and the assumed drop in international economic activity there have greatly slowed the popularity of Indonesian.

Learning Japanese has flourished for more than two decades, assisted especially by support from the Japanese government. However, it is currently showing signs of weakening in face of the challenge from Chinese.

Chinese combines a number of strong advantages as the language of choice, being part of a prestigious cultural heritage and the language of a country with appealing tourist destinations, one which is also an emerging world power, Australia's most significant trading partner, and source of one of our biggest immigrant groups. As well, Chinese offers schools entry to the lucrative international student market, and its spread is receiving support from the Chinese government.

However, Chinese has also a number of problems of its own, most notably that it still largely amounts to Chinese teaching Chinese to Chinese, a situation which leaves beginners in the language overwhelmed in class and in public examinations, despite some efforts to divide the groups. Even in well separated classes, it takes English speakers four times as long to learn Chinese as French, for example, yet in schools the study of Chinese and other languages are timetabled identically.

Language provision

So how should a school choose a language for its curriculum?

First and foremost, it must be one in which there is the chance to offer sound educational experience. If proficiency as well as educational benefits are the aim, then the essentials are a personally warm, well-trained teacher with excellent proficiency in the language, and the chance to employ more good teachers as the program develops.

There is also need for material resources, especially the means to escape the confines of the classroom and enter at least a virtual world of the new language through interactive computer technology.

Principals and teachers who are proud of achievements but do not treat good language students as exceptional, are critically important, and a positive attitude inside the school - language displays at Reception, for example - is almost tangibly influential.

But the most powerful boost to learner motivation and opportunity comes from meaningful language use through relationships with in-country sister schools conducted by email and actual visits. Both due to initial impact and because they provide the means for development, these can be exceptionally motivating and useful. However, success is not automatic: exchanges work best when linked to jointly created, real activities (school work, music, sport …), not just tied to language learning on its own, and, like other successful human relationships, they need to be monitored and wisely directed.

Australians, who through heritage or interest have some proficiency in a language other than English, are recognised to have a right to study it formally, and for this reason, and in order to maintain the precious linguistic wealth of the country, Victoria and New South Wales provide the full range of accredited school study in more than 40 languages in Saturday programs.

This is a situation unparalleled anywhere, and it leaves educators around the world gasping in awe and admiration. Why? Because, first, it prevents sudden identity rupture between the old and the new for those families involved, which is socially stabilising for them and everyone else; and, second, because it maintains their access to the linguistic and cultural wealth of the societies where the language is now and has historically been used.

This gives Australia access to the quite fantastic storehouse of human knowledge, artistic creation, ways of being, forms of expression, and so on, developed by a huge number of the diverse range of human beings who have ever lived.

Obstacles to development

Solid blocks to progress in language learning development in Australia include:

1. Public attitude: gasps at Rudd's proficiency in two languages which thousands of children and adults in Australia can match are pathetic and backhandedly damaging. The business community pays almost no attention to language skills, even where these might better protect its interests. To recognise bilingualism as an advance over English-only requires a cognitive and emotional change. Pain in the colonial superiority nerve is a key negative incentive to this occurring.
    
2. Despite having as good an educational rationale as mathematics, language study lacks maths' political clout, largely due to being diffused across more than a dozen languages, many of which find themselves in competition with one another inside schools.
    
3. Lack of continuity from primary to secondary study often necessitates switching language or the boredom of repeating everything from scratch.
    
4. At university, with noble exceptions, the intellectual challenges of language teaching are poorly understood, the field generally despised among academics, and languages not well taught.
    
5. Student language teachers are taught together, so little or no work is done on the challenges of a specific language, nor on the different preparation needs for work both inside and outside the classroom of (i) those teaching their mother tongue, who do not know the demands it makes on learners and who may have difficulty relating to Australians, and (ii) locals who understand the learning demands and the school relationships, but are still not fully proficient in the language.

Diversity of linguistic and cultural knowledge means community wealth, but language study offerings cannot be left entirely to market forces. The decline of Indonesian is very much the result of parents deciding that it will not provide jobs opportunities in the (short term) future. But it is in all our interests that Australia has some people who know the language and think of the 230 million people who live next door; just as it is going to be in our collective interest that more people, than there are at present, know and understand China; just as it is essential that there be some in the community who can read mottoes like Vires Acquirit Eundo which adorn our cities, and the historical documents that form the base of our civilisation.

The government ensures the nation's Olympic strength. Government direction is also needed to ensure the nation's language strength meets its needs.