Why learning Chinese should be compulsory in Australian schools
Alex Malley
While we all wait with bated breath to see how Asia responds to the prospect of Donald Trump in the White House, some introspection about how well Australia is prepared to fully engage in the Asian Century would be prudent.
China is Australia's biggest trading partner. Our freshly minted free trade agreement, delivered by the Abbott government, directly links Australian expertise with China's exploding middle class and is all about job opportunities for our children.
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In this context, Asian literacy matters. Yet even a cursory look at figures for participation in year 12 Chinese reveals the extent of our failing.
In NSW, for example, in 2005 there were around 1500 students taking Chinese; in 2015 there were only 832. Worse still, only 153 of those were non-native Chinese speakers. More students studied Latin.
The same scenario is played out across the country – of the 4000 students doing Chinese in year 12 nationally in 2015, no more than 400 were from a non-Chinese background.
It is evident that the custodians of our education system – which is all of us – are a long way from equipping the next generation with the skills necessary to capitalise on the suite of business and cultural opportunities that exist on our doorstep.Our children need to be compulsorily learning Asian languages and cultures, starting in kindergarten all the way through to year 12, and beyond.
It's what former prime minister Bob Hawke envisaged when he launched his plan in 1987 which recently released cabinet documents show was "a concerted response to the crisis in languages education in Australia".
Hawke's policies morphed into the National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools (NALSAS) Strategy under Paul Keating, which emerged from a fully fledged COAG process to ensure a nationally consistent approach.
The bonhomie lasted only eight years, not long enough to graduate the first cohort of students, before the Howard government pulled the funding. Despite subsequent genuine enthusiasm from Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott, who acknowledged the "precipitous decline" and pledged to reverse the trend, all subsequent policies have failed to deliver the desired impact.
The reform baton now passes to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who over the course of his time in public office has demonstrated both understanding and commitment to doing something about this most important of public policy challenges.
In a policy note from 2012 when Turnbull was an opposition frontbencher, he pinpointed a real issue of concern – "the disheartening experience many students of Chinese have when they are competing in class with children from Chinese families".
Let's at least get some national leadership around a broadening of the Chinese language offer.
Above and beyond the tonal challenges of learning Mandarin, Turnbull was reflecting concerns that non-Chinese-speaking students struggle to compete with native speakers, something backed up by statistics, which show around 94 per cent of non-native students drop the language by year 10.
If the transformative reforms we've been pursuing since the '80s are too much, as evidence says they are, then let's at least get some national leadership around a broadening of the Chinese language offer to provide viable options for native and non-native speakers.
At the moment, the states are left to their own devices, with too many interested and motivated non-native students falling between the curriculum cracks.
There are some green shoots. The trial of an online foreign language program in 41 preschools in 2015 and nearly 300 this year is set to be rolled out across the country in 2017, thanks to a $6 million allocation in the May budget. Both the provision of the funding and the fact that 32 per cent of preschoolers enrolled in the program chose to study Chinese are encouraging.
Schools themselves are also doing what they can to ensure provision of comprehensive Mandarin programs from prep to year 12, and to encourage students to stay the course beyond year 10 and into senior school studies. As part of that, some schools have even established campuses in China to provide students with opportunities for a deeper immersion in Chinese language, culture and history.
They are the exception rather than the rule, and it's not as if other countries are sitting idly by, waiting for us to get our act together. Trump notwithstanding, the US is pushing ahead with a plan to boost the number of American children studying Mandarin from 200,000 to 1 million by 2020.
As the cabinet documents from 1987 highlighted, "Language learning and use are too closely related to Australia's economic development to allow languages to languish as a forgotten part of the curriculum".
Providing a level playing field for students to study Chinese as a second language on a nationally consistent basis, as identified by the Prime Minister, is not only common sense, it would represent a significant contribution to the national curriculum and provide every chance for every child to be a part of the Asian Century.
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