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.
Deadline extended till 11 May
Current and future teachers of German, Goethe-Institut resource centre librarians and principals with a minimum basic knowledge of German have now two extra weeks to submit their application. The 4-week intensive language course in Germany between September 2012 and January 2013 is accompanied by a rich cultural and leisure program and internationally recognised exams are an attractive option at the end.
http://www.goethe.de/ins/au/lp/lhr/sti/leh/en3385795.htm
Please come to the planning meeting for the Bilingual Education Day Conference this Thursday 23rd September at 6:30 pm
To build on the success of a union anti-intervention speaking tour of Steve Patrick and Peter Inverway earlier this year, Melbourne Anti Intervention Collective is planning a bilingual education day conference on a Saturday in November.
In holding the conference we aim to raise awareness about the ban on Aboriginal languages for the first four hours of school days, and associated measures like welfare quarantining that punish students, families and Aboriginal culture for problems created by chronic under-resourcing. On a more local level, we would address questions of the place- or lack of space- for Aboriginal culture and history in the National Curriculum.
Phillip Mahnken, University of the Sunshine Coast
Andrew Bolt is right (Herald 28 May). Most Australians in general do not want to learn languages. Greg Sheridan points to the same ‘disturbing truth’ (A nation adrift in Asia literacy. The Australian 27 May 2010).
A “language graveyard” for 222 years, indigenous languages eradicated, migrant languages met with hostility, fear and obstruction, Australia risks intellectual and cultural narrowness, even cerebral inferiority. Yes, learning languages expands your brain capacities, at any age! Seeing Europeans and Asians routinely speak three or four languages, the average Australian traveller feels dumb in his monolingualism.
Our society, culture and education systems fail languages, even as we acknowledge that we need language skills for aid and trade, security, personal enlightenment and to be credible global citizens.
There is top-level bipartisan agreement on this (Hamish McDonald, SMH, 29 May). Now we need bipartisan commitment at state and federal levels to a sustained PR campaign for languages, and unstinting pursuit of excellent teaching and quality learning!
Money alone may produce – in our over-bureaucratised society – more talkfests, policy, planning, budgets and accountability reports. No, money would best be devoted to direct Year 11 and 12 and university languages scholarships, especially for vetted in-country studies. We cannot afford to wait and hope that targets for today’s Grade 4 pupils (in our “ludicrously uncoordinated” languages matrix, as Bolt charges) will result in a new Asia literate generation twelve years hence.
The predictable calls for ”more resources” (Hamish McDonald, SMH, 29 May) could almost be dispensed with, if only motivation and attitudes …. but attitudes are on a feedback loop.
School and university students won’t work hard at things their parents, other educators, principals, community leaders and the media obviously do not care about or deride. Young people will apply themselves at years of football or swimming training, even the mental demands of English, maths, chess, music – languages, too – if their parents, older peers, role models and employers visibly and actively endorse them. Don’t care and your kids won’t try. “Too much effort and too high-risk for too little likely reward”, McDonald cites Tony Abbott. If students want to drop out, principals and parents blame languages teachers for being ineffective, irrelevant or asking too much. Round and round it loops.
Millions of ‘blind Freddies’, like Andrew Bolt, do not see the obvious cognitive and “cultural payoff” of language learning: better spelling and grammar because you reflect on where your own language comes from and how it works, better thinking skills, patience and persistence, better communication skills and intercultural understanding. Languages mediate more and deeper insider information about everyone else, whether you are a vigilant realist, soft diplomat or backpacker sans frontieres.
The only war languages teachers are interested in is the culture war needed to change Australian culture from “fear is good” and gullible consumerism to a healthy, positive, other-interested society with everyone learning other languages. It costs money to counter all that apathy and negativity. It demands willingness and willpower to work on our own children who may prefer (encouraged every dollar of the way by advertisers) to fritter away their mental lifetimes on computer shoot-em-ups, junk TV, the latest pop songs and mags.
Pardon my Spanish, but does Australia have the cojones to do the right thing by its children?
Or is this society and education so commodified that school principals, university decision makers and community opinion shapers will not do a damned thing without putting their hand out for “what’s in it for me?” You wanted a market economy. Your children are standing in it.
All Aussie kids must be given a chance to be literate and numerate, to make music, play sport, do science… but not all can be guaranteed a second language.
It can’t be mandated because it can’t be resourced. There are not enough LOTE teachers, especially of the right kinds in the right places – and may never be, to judge by the effect of recruitment campaigns throughout the English-speaking-world.
So what can be done?
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.
