Australia: Sprechen Sie … um… anything?

[Harold Schiffman]

Sprechen Sie… um… anything?
 Monday 24 March 2008, 2:48 pm    The Editor

The Rudd government, through education minister Julia Gillard, has
flagged a strong policy focus on LOTE (Languages Other Than English)
in primary and secondary schools. THE Federal Government is moving to
significantly increase the number of students graduating with foreign
language skills by pushing the states towards a nationally consistent
language curriculum. New government research to be released tomorrow
has found that students are being turned off languages because they
believe the subject will affect their university entry scores or
because they are told by parents and career teachers that language
skills are not relevant to their future.
Gillard says that Australian students need second language skills to
remain internationally competitive — and this is true — but there are
other major advantages to learning foreign languages in school.

1) Learning another language improves one's English skills.
Getting your head around the grammar, sentence structure, spelling,
punctuation and formatting rules (and contradictions!) of a foreign
language makes you pay attention — perhaps for the first time — to the
same rules that you use intuitively in the English language. However,
to use a language well you've got to do more than just use it
intuitively. A lot of people can write and speak seemingly
sophisticated sentences in English with fancy words and complicated
structures, but are relying on reciting them from memory without a
basic understanding of the underlying rules that govern the language
they've just used. Learning another language from scratch helps you
learn how to better use the building blocks of your native language
that allow you to "play" with words, get creative, and better
communicate in a range of genres and situations.

2) Learning another language improves one's thinking.
More to the point, it improves your metacognition — thinking about
thinking. The process of forming connections between foreign and
native vocab gives you an amazing insight into the way your brain
ticks. People who understand the way that they think, and can
manipulate their thinking and actions while engineering situations to
best match their thinking styles, are better overall learners than
people who have poor metacognition.

3) Learning another language improves one's cultural understanding and
relations.
Pretty obvious this one but very important. Language is a window
through which you can understand a culture and its history. Everyone's
heard the story about how Eskimos have forty words for snow or
something like that, but there are less obvious ways to read history
through words. The literal English translation of a foreign word may
reveal a between the lines truth about the way other people think.
Also, what are the first words you learn in another language? Foods
and other interesting cultural tidbits.

When we travel overseas we expect practically everyone to speak
English and, lucky for us, they usually speak enough for us to
communicate. Just because English is basically the universal language
of travel isn't an excuse to get lazy and refuse to learn anything
else. Making an effort to learn another person's language shows
respect — even if your efforts to hold a conversation fail and you
both need to default to English.

4) Learning another language increases one's sense of the world and
decreases one's insularity.
This is especially crucial for Australia. We're a young country and
rather isolated and insular in our corner of the world. With our close
cultural ties to other English speaking countries, and English one of
the "global" languages, it's easy to forget that it's not the mother
tongue for the majority of Earth's citizens. By failing to force
students to learn another language at school, combined with the fact
that we can generally get by with English alone when travelling, we
reinforce the false primacy of English and a lack of need for other
language skills.

Overall, it's hard to justify the current attitude to LOTE in schools.
We should really be requiring primary and secondary school students to
study at least one language up to grade ten. Western European
languages are most commonly taught at schools but the focus in future
should be on south-east Asian languages as they will become
increasingly relevant to our lives. Oh, and there are dozens of live
Aboriginal languages that exist within our very own country. What
about some of them?

http://www.grods.com/post/2176/

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