Reprinted from the Australian Higher Education Supplement 2 September 2009.
The authors are Professor Kent Anderson, Director of the Faculty of Asian Studies at the Australian National University and Professor Joseph Lo Bianco, Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Melbourne.
Read the original article …
Languages are back in the news. As part of the national curriculum debate, English is one of the first cabs off the rank and Languages Other Than English are following in the second group.
The National Asian Languages and Studies in Schools Program also adds limited funding for the next three years to promoting four targeted languages.
Moreover, there is the slow burn of the crisis of language learning at both secondary level, where a pitiful 12 per cent of students who complete secondary schooling take languages in their final exams, and at the tertiary level, where the number of languages taught has fallen from 66 to less than 30 in the past decade.
This discourse is taking place against the backdrop of the financial crisis, which only heightens how important languages are in our rapidly and deeply globalised world, where the pension incomes of Australians are tied to the economic fortunes of North Americans, Asians and Europeans.
This is what globalisation ultimately means: international dependency of a depth that has never been experienced in human history.
When the economic and social fortunes of all countries are so directly and closely tied to those of other countries a debate about overcoming the all too real language education crisis in Australia is very much to bewelcomed.
However, the way the national conversation about languages is framed is disappointing and ultimately futile. Australia has unique potential as an Anglophone but multilingual country with European institutions and traditions, at the edge of the fastest growing and most dynamic part of the world, with Asian friends and neighbours. Few would believe we have lived up to our national potential, which is only available through a rich understanding of a multitude of languages.
Despite recent intensified interest in language education we are concerned that today’s debates risk entrenching three fallacies. The first is the “English will do” fallacy.
The second is that we have to choose between Asia and Europe. The third is that language education serves only a utilitarian purpose, a fallacy which argues that we need foreign language skills exclusively to serve the utilitarian purpose of promoting trade and international political relations.
Let us examine each of these misconceptions in turn. Too many advocates of languages fear that recognition of the unique and unparalleled importance of English in the world diminishes the case for other languages.
We feel the complete opposite is true. The reality of the global lingua franca role of English is undeniable. Recent estimates are that close to one-third of the population of the world either knows or is studying English.
Australia has a vast benefit derived in English medium education. To remove the native speaker advantage, countries in Asia, Europe and the Americas whose national languages are not English increasingly offer specialised business, technology and science programs in English to compete in this promising market. So why is this not bad news for other languages?
Because the millions of Chinese, Germans and Paraguayans who are learning and using English to communicate with Bulgarians and Americans alike are adding English to their Chinese, German and Spanish. As they become bilingual, it is only native speakers of English who remain monolingual. The disadvantage is reversed. While not knowing English is a disadvantage, knowing only English is a disadvantage too.
The second fallacy is the categorical choice we are often enjoined to make. Put aside Europe, we are part of Asia; or reject Asia andcleave to Europe. The dichotomy is absurdly false.
Is the French and Spanish spoken throughout the Pacific an Asian or European language; what about the Cantonese spoken in Canada?
More significant than the silliness of trying to apply Middle Aged typology to a 21st century mobile world, we need national language capability in both so-called Asian and European languages.
Each particular language has its distinctive needs. What Australia needs to do to ensure a national language capability in Vietnamese and Hindi, Spanish and German, is unique to each of those languages.
There is no Asian language category; even so-called character based languages are radically different from each other. We must teach in our schools and universities the key languages of Asia and the key languages of Europe. We must also support languages that do not fit neatly into secure geographic categorisations but which are important for Australian national interests (Arabic, Russian, and world languages such as Spanish).
Moreover, a humane and sophisticated languages policy sensitive to national need must find ways to support Aboriginal and community languages.
We should have a policy that aims to conserve the remarkable contribution that immigrant communities from all over the world make to the nation. Of course we agree that our schools cannot teach all languages, but students and communities provide these programs in vast numbers.
The final fallacy, and in some ways the deepest and most troubling, is the almost exclusively utilitarian approach to language learning that much of the recent discussion has taken. Of course, the trade and security reasons for studying languages are enormously important on a variety of levels, but ultimately the reason students should learn and study languages is a humanistic one.
First, we know that students may start a language for utilitarian purposes, but the research also teaches that it is what language brings beyond some potential future job that keeps students studying until their language proficiency is functionally useful.
Studying languages allows our students to encounter human differences in their most natural way and thereby to open themselves to an exploring and understanding of the self based on learning about the other.
There will always be a need for short term and specialised niche language teaching in particular languages, but the providers of this kind of training can do so best on the basis ofa successful apprenticeship in bilingualism in schools.
Ultimately this is why we compel young Australians to be schooled. We want them to experience rich, humanistic education that asks questions about the civilisations of Europe and Asia, not to mention the Americas and Africa.
A language education policy that takes seriously the highest intellectual, cultural and civilisational ideals of the great experiences ofhumanity must be global, taking in both Asian and European and fusing these together to help forge a uniquely Australian world literacy.
September 2nd, 2009 | Category: Reprinted | Comments Off
