Public Meeting on this issue
Monday 24 August, 7.30pm
Multicultural Hub
506 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne
(Opposite Queen Victoria Market, Melway Map 1E J2)
Speakers include:
- Professor Michael Clyne, Universities of Melbourne and Monash
- Dr Bruno Mascitelli, Swinburne University
- Mr Stefan Romaniw, CEO, Community Languages Australia
- Mr Frank Merlino, Principal, Victorian School of Languages
RSVP Christine 03 9474 0531
August 26th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
The public meeting on this issue brought together about 100 people. Here are some of the points discussed.
Did you know that Australia is unique in providing the opportunity to study 45 ‘small’ languages to Year 12? To quote Prof. Michael Clyne, the proposed suspension of the Year 12 Accreditation Certificate represents the ‘erosion of an important Australian achievement’.
The suspension argument centres on the current threshhold requirement that there be 15 candidates for each SCL.
Languages that have recently lost this certificate accreditation are Bengali, Czech, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Slovenian, whose exam candidates dropped below 15.
Albanian, with 14 candidates in 2008, looks like the next one to go. Other vulnerable languages with less than 20 candidates in 2008 are Dutch, Hungarian, Maltese, Romanian, Swedish and Ukrainian.
There is no real argument for imposing such a threshold. Firstly, the teaching of the so-called ‘small’ languges is provided outside the mainstream education system; secondly, the cost to the government of organizing examinations is minimal.
Maintaining this threshhold undermines the diversity of Australia’s language potential, but also devalues and ignores the efforts of the parents who motivated their children to maintain and develop literacy skills in these languages. It seems the government does not respect the choices made by parents about languages that are meaningful and useful to them.