Australia's present and future is multilingual.
Every child in Australia should grow up at least bilingual.
Languages education starts before school life and should continue throughout.
The Melbourne Language Picnic - 2010
The Melbourne Language Picnic is on again!
Date: Sunday, 21st March, National Harmony Day 2010, from 9 am to 5 pm.
Venue: Collingwood Children’s Farm, St. Heliers Street, Abbotsford.
Bring your family and friends, your lingo and share in some multilingual fun and games.
For further information, follow this link:
http://www.melbournelanguagepicnic.wordpress.com/
Languages during the Multicultural Festival, Sunday 7 February 11-5pm
The ACT Ethnic Schools Association and members of the ACT Bilingual Education Alliance are again joining forces to organise a stall at Contact Canberra, the community expo held as part of the Multicultural Festival.
Come along and see us on Sunday 7 February from 11am to 5pm at stall number 61, City Walk, right next to the children’s Merry-go-Round in Civic.
You are also welcome to publicise your language programs and resources at the stall. Last year there were a great number of enquiries, especially about classes for adults and very young children so it is a great way to promote your activities.
Please contact Marina.Houston@Canberra.edu.au or call 6201 2483 if you have leaflets or posters you would like to display or would like to help staff the stall during the day.
For those not able to attend the recent RUMACCC (University of Melbourne) seminar on raising bilingual children, the link below will take you to the handouts for the sessions on what parents can do to encourage language learning beyond the home, for their children and community alike.
Source: Mandy Scott
The turnout was similar to last year’s picnic – about 25 – and keen and useful links were made between a range of languages: Mandarin, Cantonese, Italian, Russian, Indonesian and Welsh.
Most of the children who attended were too young for the ‘how many languages can you find’ game. However, those who had a go (and their mum!!) got something out of it. For anyone wishing to follow up on the above language connections, please contact Mandy.Scott@anu.edu.au
The link below leads to references on the role of maintaining a learner’s first language in relation to the acquisition of English.
http://www.tesol.org.au/Issues/Place-of-First-Language
“The Australian and international TESOL fields argue that the maintenance and ongoing development of a student’s first language (L1) provides learners with a solid base from which to acquire an additional language.
Awareness of the positive influences associated with supporting L1 development is particularly important for young learners. Older learners actively draw on knowledge of their first language and its structure, conceptual and content knowledge held in this language and their L1 literacy skills when learning a subsequent language. However younger learners do not yet have this depth of knowledge to draw on and without appropriate support they are at risk of failing to acquire full proficiency in either their first language or the main language of school instruction.”
Thank you, Mandy Scott, for this information.
Tags: Place of first language
Great to see the language picnics catching on!
ACT Bilingual Education Alliance invite you to the next Multilingual Picnic in Canberra. For more details, please contact Guiliana Komnacki (0414) 269 335 or email Marina.Houston@canberra.edu.au
You are invited to a FREE seminar for parents, early childhood and pre-school workers, grandparents, teachers and others interested in bilingual education.
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 12:45pm – 5pm
Carrillo Gantner Theatre, Sidney Myer Asia Centre, Cnr Swanston St and Monash Rd, University of Melbourne
THE SEMINAR IS FREE BUT REGISTRATION IS ESSENTIAL by November 23rd.
by Brigitte Lambert
Wide-eyed and earnest, a five-year-old tells me he speaks two languages besides English, and pulls a Lilliputian French-German dictionary from his jeans pocket. ‘I can say ‘bitte’ and ‘danke’ and ‘bon jour’ and ‘au ‘voir’. Naturally, I’m impressed. Clearly he already knows something about the value of being polite in different languages.
I think of some more high profile Australians who have demonstrated the value of multilingualism in the international spotlight: a prime minister and his diplomatic use of Mandarin; a national team captain, whose use of German in press interviews during the 2006 world soccer finals made a very favourable impression on the locals; and an archbishop, who drew the cheers of the major pilgrim groups on World Youth Day, by welcoming each of them in their own language – Italian, Spanish, French and German.
Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you don’t mind some Rieu-style enthusiasm, a big round of applause!
Of course, not everyone with an extended language repertoire will be destined to make such public overtures, nor necessarily aim to do so. Often the benefits of multilingualism are located in the family, in talking to Nine, Apó and Yiayiá, and staying connected to cultural roots. For many, school languages provide the gateway into new worlds of experience, as travelers through foreign countries, literature and film, and yes, there can be careers attached. Yet others enter the multilingual adventure through living overseas and wanting to forge a deeper relationship with their temporary compatriots. Above all, as research repeatedly shows, language learning is good for the brain, developing mental flexibility and lateral thinking, particularly when this language contact occurs from an early age. But importantly, language learning can – and should – also be fun.
‘It’s interesting to see how different languages are put together’, comments a teenager studying Japanese.
‘To me each language has a kind of music, a rhythm’, says her friend, comparing Italian and Greek.
Australia’s linguistic diversity includes Aboriginal, community and sign languages, some 350 languages in all. However, the value of this vast resource remains unacknowledged by government planners, and not even the prime minister’s example has as yet translated into palpable motivation for revitalizing the languages-in-education curricula beyond Asian languages. Their vision of how to maximize Australia’s linguistic potential is decidedly limited. Even speaking a language other than English may still be perceived as ‘showing off’, no less by politicians who really should know better. Such attitudes are at odds with the image of Australia as a tolerant and progressive society that the rhetoric on government websites presents to the world. Not once is multilingualism mentioned as a value in the booklet describing life in Australia to prospective immigrants, an irony indeed, given that when I last checked, this publication was available in twenty-nine languages.
Who then fans the flame of multilingualism in this country? Thankfully, there are parents, teachers, community groups and other interested parties who also have a vision for their children and the society in which they live and are committed to passing on their language, their passion and cute bilingual dictionaries. Put your hands together for the people!
That little boy is still learning to read and can’t yet decipher the unfamiliar words in the pocket book, but he appears to treasure his gift. I only hope his budding language interests will flower and flourish so he too can build bridges, grand or small, in whatever ways will be open to him.
This text is an amended version of the article published in ‘Kultur’, magazine of the Goethe-Institut in Australia, in October 2008.
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Tags: Australia, multilingualism, values
