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

It is my understanding that Prof. Joe Lo Bianco and others have applied for a NALSSP grant to establish the projected “National Tertiary Languages Network”. News on the current 2010 round of NALSSP grant proposals should follow now that the dust is settling from the recent 2010 federal election. If we want a thoroughly integrated languages education in Australia, with sensible articulation top to bottom, and effective lobbying and promotion, we need to have everyone networking together from AlphaTykes to PhD supervisors. Philip Mahnken, Sunshine Coast
Recommendations from the Beyond the Crisis Colloquium
Recommendation 1: That universities, at the policy level, give explicit and urgent recognition to the strategic importance of the study of languages and cultures; and that they develop appropriate strategies and provide adequate resources for the promotion and effective maintenance of these studies. This would include attention and resources be given to providing appropriate identification procedures (such as placement tests),
and sufficient course levels and pathways to allow learners with diverse language backgrounds to be grouped according to their proficiency and learning needs, so that their full learning potential can be realised.
Recommendation 2: That the university sector (perhaps through DASSH) work towards a uniform and nuanced definition of what constitutes attrition, and that the relevant
faculties generate and make readily available comparative statistics about attrition in languages and other humanities and social sciences areas.
Recommendation 3: That individual languages programmes across Australia consider the practice of a motivation / intention / background questionnaire on the model of the one
used in LASP 2, to be administered to all students early in the first semester of their language study. The questionnaire takes only a few minutes of class time and, although the recording and analysis of data is time-consuming, this should be budgeted for by the relevant schools in order to provide a clearer picture of the student cohort and their motivations and intentions, to better predict class sizes, to facilitate staff planning, and to provide a basis for ongoing curriculum review. The information gathered could be shared through the National Tertiary Languages Network.
Recommendation 4: That the National Tertiary Languages Network undertake, as a matter of priority, to engage with the issues raised in relation to TELL, particularly with a view to enabling increased collaboration and exchange across the sector. [end quote]

There are many valuable and encouraging reports and other publications at the Australian Academy of the Humanities website http://www.humanities.org.au/ I got the above quote from AN ANALYSIS OF RETENTION STRATEGIES AND TECHNOLOGY ENHANCED LEARNING IN BEGINNERS’ LANGUAGES OTHER THAN ENGLISH (LOTE) AT AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES.

 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

The exhibition opened on 19th June and runs to 10th October, 2010, so there’s still plenty of time to enjoy this cultural experience and to get some basic German lessons as a bonus. 

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/linguafranca/stories/2010/2850694.htm

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/

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

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