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.

We would also put this attack on Aboriginal educational rights in the context of the NT Intervention, and of the resistance to the intervention.

We see this as an important way to build up the general resistance to Anti Aboriginal racism and resistance to the assimilation push. We want to consolidate primarily education union members, but also more generally teachers, academics, students and other interested parties as Aboriginal rights activists.

We need your help to make this conference as relevant as possible, and to help it reach as wide an audience as possible. We are holding a planning meeting this Thursday evening at the New International Bookshop at Trades Hall.

We would love your ideas about speakers, your knowledge about the issues, your networks and ideas about how we can end these policies.

A tentative agenda for the conference is:

• Session One: Bilingual Education – What’s happening and why?
• Session Two: The National Curriculum and Indigenous Perspectives
• Session Three: Where to from here

Look forward to seeing you there,

Lucy Honan
0404728104

 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.

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?

We can formally acknowledge the practical utility of “apprenticeship language” learning. This is a strategy commended for wider deployment by Prof Joseph Lo Bianco (“Second Languages and Australian Schooling”,2009). It involves recognizing that much language understanding is transferrable between languages, so that learning a simple non-target language before a more difficult (and hard to resource) language is very effective in getting more students fluent in target languages.

This acknowledgement changes everything because a language apprenticeship in simple, intercultural Esperanto is something that all primary teachers are now equipped to provide. The resource which teaches them as they teach their class is called “Talking to the Whole Wide World: Integrated LOTE and Intercultural Studies for Australian Primary Schools”. Because of the design of both the language and the program, children are able to achieve mastery in 100-200 hours and leave primary school bilingual. This can be defined as the minimum Australian children deserve in primary LOTE education- it’s a lot better than the nothing they have now!

The broad intercultural education that comes with sharing a new language with an international peer group spread over more than 100 countries is a great precursor to more specific studies later, too.

I’m looking to gather a group of educators who can see that secondary LOTE teachers would be much more successful if all students arrived bilingual in a first foreign language, and ready to apply their knowledge skills and confidence to the next one. Are you one? Please let me know!

Penelope Vos: penivos@yahoo.com

http://www.rumaccc.unimelb.edu.au/schools/how.html

Since the Public Meeting on this issue in August, the following action has been taken:

1. A Press Release was prepared and circulated with some media reports.

2. The matter was raised with the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority. A delegation made up of Professor Michael Clyne, Pandora Petrovska, Frank Merlino and Stefan Romaniw, met with the Acting CEO of the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, Mr David Howes on September 15, 2009.

The outcome of that meeting was as follows:

(a)    We wanted clarification as to what would happen to CCAFL in light of current national developments.  There has been a national curriculum for some languages in the form of CCAFL, predating the current move towards National Curriculum.  We made the point that it would be a terrible situation to dismantle a system that was working well. We were told that there were no moves to change any of the current set-up for language examination.  The languages that will be part of the National Curriculum have not yet been decided.

(b)    Mr Howes was open to the suggestion that there be a moratorium on the de-accreditation of VCE smaller candidature languages until the status of the National Curriculum for languages has been clarified.  He said that he would raise this with the VCAA Board and contact us regarding the outcome.

(c)     He said the issue of the de-accreditation of smaller candidature languages was not a costing issue as such, rather that a minimum number was required in an administrative sense.

(d)    We discussed the global scaling issue which often adversely affects the scores of smaller candidature languages, an issue which was raised at the Public Meeting. Mr Howes said that this affected other subject areas as well, and when it was implemented, was thought to be the fairest method of ranking students for university entry.  Until such a time, that universities establish other methods for tertiary entry, such as university partnership with schools, student portfolios and aptitude testing, the scaling would remain.

(e)    It was quite a positive meeting overall and we await a response regarding (b) from Mr Howes.

1. In Term 4 a Working Party needs to be established with representation from the key stakeholders who can take this matter further. The Working Party could consist of representatives from

• Tertiary
• Victorian School of Languages
• Community Languages Australia
• Modern Language Teachers Association of Victoria
• Ethnic Communities’ Council of Victoria
• Victorian Council of School Organisations
• Multilingual Australia
• Victorian Association of Secondary School Principals
• Australian Education Union

Click here to take the survey

In the LOTE@HOME pack, there’s a set of 50+ laminated cards for rooms in the home. Families attach the cards to the thing they refer to – the stove, the door, the dishwasher, the cupboard, the bath, the tap and so on. There are cards for the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen.

Family members use the words on the cards, mixed in with their usual language, to make sentences. So for example, a parent could say to a child “… please close ‘la porta’ when you come in …” Gradually, everyone will absorb the Italian word for ‘door’. And so it goes with all the other cards.

Click here to go to the website

In another set of cards in the pack, it’s all about learning the names of body parts. With this set, you can play a game, like ‘Snap’ or ‘Go Fish’ but use the foreign words to do it. The pronunciation is explained too.

By using the cards, and reinforcing words around the house, kids will learn a new language in exactly the same way they learned English – by immersion and absorption.

LOTE@HOME packs are not intended to replace formal LOTE lessons, however they are intended to build an “in country environment” in the home that will support the formal learning of a second language.

Click here to go to the website

The survey will be online by Friday 5 September 2008.

“This year, the UN International Year of Languages, countries all over the world have been reflecting on their achievements in languages and what they could be doing better.

In Australia, we have seen the continuation of a public discourse which started the previous year, on the benefits of second language learning and the decline in language programs over the years.

I will argue that this discourse will remain on the surface if it does not take into account the linguistic diversity we are blessed with, and if we cannot overcome our pervasive monolingual mindset.

I will also suggest a different, more holistic way of thinking about the benefits of plurilingualism, that is the use of more than one language. “

As well as being Emeritus Professor at Monash University and an honorary professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne, Michael Clyne is a bilingual parent of a bilingual child and is a member of the Languages Action Alliance.

Read the transcript

A large part of her career in the past has been to help teachers to make sense of new and emerging technologies and to help infuse these in all curriculum areas in all grade levels.

Poppy maintains a blog for the Brisbane Courier Mail on digital resources for the classroom.

In this post she has provided an impressive list of links to websites related to languages learning. Go there now

Reprinted from Languages in Education newsletter 22 August 2008

NB: There are quite a few broken links on this page, but there are also some gems.