Australia's Monolingual Mindset
This nation fears to teach languages other than English.
Mar 29, 2007
Australians come from a huge range of cultures and linguistic backgrounds. A pool of educational potential is thus available to enrich the nation in many ways, yet the government’s focus is only on getting all to learn English.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, at the 2001 census 16% of the population spoke a language other than English at home. Linguistic authority Michael Clyne says this is actually an underestimate.
But overall these languages are neither being passed down the generations nor taught to the wider community. Current government policies and public statements heavily emphasise English skills among migrants and hardly ever attribute value to their birth-languages. Clyne says Australia has a “monolingual mindset”.
In Australia only 12% of Year 12 students study a foreign language. Teaching of languages in primary schools is for the most part utterly inadequate. In Australian schools in general, students spend less time than their counterparts in any other OECD country studying a second language.
This is largely due to an ever-present fear amongst many Australians about people who speak anything but English. And then there is the common worry that children learn a second language to the detriment of their progress in English. The opposite is closer to the truth: their English proficiency actually tends to rise as a result of becoming bilingual.
Bilingual people tend to enjoy enhanced cognitive development, understanding better how language works and how to use it well in many different contexts. They can relate much more effectively to people of other cultures. In an age of increasing globalisation these abilities can only improve Australia’s economy and international relations.
Most especially, Australia’s relationship with its East Asian neighbours cannot substantially improve without the cultural understanding and ease of communication afforded by second-language proficiency.
In 1987 at a Griffith University Conference, Gough Whitlam, former Prime Minister, made a strong public plea for greater attention to Asian studies in educational institutions. He particularly emphasised the need for Australians to learn Chinese, predicting that China was likely to become a major economic power in the long term.
In hindsight the acuity of Whitlam’s perception is particularly apparent, and yet the status of Asian languages in Australian schools and universities is no higher than it was at the time of Whitlam’s speech.
In fact, as Professor Tim Lindsey recently observed, over the decade since 1996 the number of Australian university teachers specialising in Asian languages has declined alarmingly and their average age is over 50. Only 2.9% of tertiary students are enrolled in Asia-related courses.
The Howard Government confidently asserts that Australia has a “special relationship” with Indonesia, due to geographical entwinement and the friendly rapport between their respective heads of government. Meanwhile a poll by the Lowy Institute indicates that the average Australian sees Indonesia as a dangerous neighbour in which terrorists train. Only 400 students in Australian universities were enrolled to study Indonesian in 2006.
In 2004 the Commonwealth Government attended the Asia-Pacific Economic Council and agreed with other nations from the region that improving the peoples’ skills in languages other than English must be a high priority for Australia. However, since then there has been little or no apparent effort by the Government to put the idea into practice.
A few months ago Kevin Rudd became the Leader of the Opposition in the Federal Parliament, and much has been made in the mass media about his long-standing fluency in Mandarin Chinese. Rudd has enjoyed extremely high popular support since taking over the Labor leadership. Does this give grounds for hope that, under a Rudd Government, Australia will be able to take steps towards becoming a vigorously multilingual nation?
