Languages at school

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?