Ensuring a love of languages
Let’s start with some interesting figures. There are around 300 languages spoken in Australia, and in the Greater Sydney area alone nearly 40 per cent of households speak a language other than English. However, in New South Wales, for example, less than 10 per cent of high school students take a language subject for their final Year 12 exams.
Yes, startling figures to say the least.
So what’s going on here?
Why are language studies so unsuccessful in a country where hundreds of languages are spoken every single day?
The problem …
There are essentially two reasons why early language learning in schools is stifled.
The first is the lack of qualified teachers. The second is that curriculums are already overcrowded.
… and the solution?
When it comes to qualified teachers, the solution is to train more specialist primary school language teachers. This has begun, but more investment is needed.
The crowded curriculum issue already has an innovative solution being carried out as we speak. In some schools, primary language teachers are successfully partnering with regular classroom teachers to teach their subjects in another language. Think history in Spanish! However, for this method to become more prevalent, significant investment in teachers is required too.
So what does this tell us?
Simply that investment in early learning, through preschool and primary years, is the key to attaining sustained language achievement.
The good news is, the Honourable Simon Birmingham, Minister for Education and Training, recently announced that the Australian Government will invest an additional $11.8 million in a successful preschool language learning program.
Let’s play with language
The successful preschool language learning program that will receive the funding is called Early Learning Languages Australia (ELLA). ELLA is leading the way, creating a play-based interactive program that preschool children can learn on tablet devices.
The program uses characters, game activities and songs to teach simple language. Now although that sounds like all fun and games (which the younger students love), the program is based on decades of international studies of early immersion language learning, which have consistently shown the cognitive, neural, visual-spatial, conceptual, social and personal benefits of learning another language early in life.
What exactly will the new funding do?
The increased funding will allow ELLA’s innovative program to be carried out in 5000 preschools and 300 schools nationally. This represents a significant impact to the sector and means that students all around the country will have the opportunity to learn the already available Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), French, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Modern Greek and Spanish. The additional funding will add German, Korean, Turkish and Vietnamese to the program.
Looking ahead
So what are the hopes and dreams here? It’s believed that the above expansion will help lay the groundwork for future sustained interest in languages.
The longer-term objectives of early language learning are to provide intellectual stimulation and intercultural curiosity and for children to see linguistic diversity as part of their everyday.
And if we start early enough, we can make this happen.