[lg policy] Australia: Foreign language learning is grown-up policy

[Harold Schiffman]

Foreign language learning is grown-up policy
By Fiona Mueller - posted Friday, 21 September 2012 	Sign Up for free
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The Leader of the Opposition's proposal to have 40% of Year 12
students learning a foreign language within a decade is seriously
intelligent policy. Earlier this year, the rather unexpected
appearance of this plan in Tony Abbott's reply to the 2012 Budget
attracted some derision, but the many challenges facing Australia in
this century demand sophisticated solutions accompanied by plenty of
hard yakka. This would be a real education revolution.

Such a strategy would finally allow Australia to identify as a modern
nation with an intellectual, international and practical commitment to
the future of its children. It would be a practical manifestation of
the ambitious claims made in the Australian Curriculum, a document
that purports to 'equip young Australians with the skills, knowledge
and understanding that will enable them to engage effectively with and
prosper in a globalised world… [to] gain personal and social benefits,
be better equipped to make sense of the world in which they live and
make an important contribution to building the social, intellectual
and creative capital of our nation.'

There are implications for international relations, national security,
community planning and individual creativity and opportunity.
Most importantly, Mr Abbott's announcement should be considered in
light of the Prime Minister's stated ambition to raise Australian
educational standards, with particular emphasis on her desire to match
or exceed the outcomes of the highest-performing Asian and European
countries.

It is ironic that in a climate of such concern about declining
standards and falling scores in international testing, the critical
connection between high-quality, long term foreign language programs
and improvements in the learners' general cognitive functioning is
still not made. The irony lies most clearly in the fact that Finland
is currently held up as the archetypal educational success story. Such
discussions fail to acknowledge that, as researcher Irina Buchberger
has explained, 'this has been a reality in the Finnish education
system since the early seventies – multilingual Finnish citizens
competent in four languages [including English].' In Finland, language
competence is 'a key element in the personal and professional
development of individuals.'

The serious study of a second or subsequent language is about learning
to be increasingly literate. For many Australian students, enrolment
in a rigorous foreign language program is the only time that they will
learn about English. They become aware of how languages work as
systems, with rules and conventions and exceptions, and that this
knowledge can be applied in useful ways in many contexts, just as
happens in mathematics, computing, music and other subject areas.

Conversely, the absence of a nationally coordinated commitment to
foreign language teaching means that Australian children are at a
major disadvantage in testing regimes that contain a stand-alone test
of grammar and punctuation, such as NAPLAN.

One of the longstanding proponents of foreign language education, the
University of Melbourne's Professor Joe Lo Bianco, has written that
'In developed countries like Australia conscious and deliberate
language planning seems only to occur in response to social or
economic problems which derive from language questions, or which have
a strong language dimension.' To this analysis can be added the fact
that Australia continues to underperform in this area of education
largely because it has taken its pedagogical lead from other Western,
English-speaking countries where foreign language teaching has been
equally ineffective.

What can be done?

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=14145

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