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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Second Session (51-2)
2008-02-28 Daily Xml
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LANGUAGES EDUCATION

Ms FOX (Bright) (15:42): Yesterday, the Minister for Education and Children's Services spoke in this place about the International Year of Languages 2008. As a former French and English teacher, I am interested in some of the comments that have been made recently in the media about foreign languages and language teaching in South Australia. In particular, I was surprised by the comments of education pundit and former federal Liberal staffer Dr Kevin Donnelly on FIVEaa. Speaking to Leon Byner, Dr Donnelly said the following:

If you can't get the first language right I've got no idea as to why you'd want to introduce something like German or French or Mandarin.

Dr Donnelly, whose research over the years has been funded by his mates from the former Liberal government and published by the Liberal-based Menzies Research Centre, does not realise that learning a foreign language (or LOTE—a language other than English) helps most students to be better English students. That is because these days—and I know that Dr Donnelly deplores this as do I—students in Australia do not learn about the grammar of English. They do not learn about syntax; they do not learn about tenses, sequence or about consistency. We see the proof of this every single day in this place. By learning about these elements in a foreign language, students realise that language is a carefully structured tool.

Professor Michael Clyne also emphasised this point in his outstanding book entitled Australia's Language Potential, which was published in 2005 by the University of New South Wales Press. And he is not alone. The front page story of The Advertiser on Monday announced the findings of a $2.2 million report entitled 'Investigation into the state and nature of languages education in Australian schooling', which was co-authored by a South Australian academic. This report calls for an urgent overhaul of our curriculum to make language study compulsory from kindergarten to year 10.

Dr Donnelly's reaction on FIVEaa to this call demonstrates a persistent monolingual mindset shared by some, which will eventually have a severe impact on this country. Already, Australian business leaders are competent in fewer languages than their counterparts in 27 other countries. According to the report mentioned previously, Australian school students now spend less time learning a language than students in any other OECD country. Fixing this is not a job for governments, although we can certainly help by addressing language teacher shortages and trying to change an ingrained culture in some schools which treat language teachers as the poor cousins of the teaching staff.

Fixing the problem is also in the hands of parents who may not realise that the world their children are going to be adults in will not necessarily be a primarily English-speaking world. The argument that I have heard many times before of 'Oh, but everyone speaks English everywhere' demonstrates a level of provincialism and ignorance which undermines our standing in the world. One of the reasons I was able to live and work overseas was because I spoke a foreign language. I did not speak it at home. I learnt it here, at school, at Blackwood High School to be precise. It might seem like a long way from Mrs Mallon's French class to working at UNESCO in Paris but that was where language took me and it was a pretty direct path.

With that in mind, I would like to touch upon another comment that Dr Donnelly made on air. He made a sweeping statement dismissing language teaching with one Neanderthal brushstroke. He said:

When you look at the way languages are taught in schools these days most of it is about sociology or tourism. Even after they have done languages for five or six years, a lot of kids don't know much anyway.

I was taken aback by the sheer ignorance of this comment. I think he made it up on the spot. One of the biggest problems facing language teachers and their institutions is the fact—not the perception, but the fact—that learning a language requires rigorous application and intellectual discipline. With all due respect, learning Mandarin at year 12 level cannot be compared to undertaking year 12 food and nutrition in terms of difficulty. I suspect it may be less intellectually challenging to learn how to make a soufflé than to learn how to speak Mandarin.

Learning another language is about economic power and gaining access to it. It is about fully understanding the culture instead of just knowing its tourist spots. We have had enough wake-up calls about language learning recently. Now it is time for parents, governments at all levels and teachers to come together and change the way we view language learning in this country. Australia will not remain competitive in an increasingly multilinguistic world if we continue with our current attitude. I believe that monolingualism will cost us far more in the future than we realise, both economically and culturally.

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