The Australian Asian Literacy Debate

Last Tuesday Canberra hosted the Asialink and Asia Society 2010 National Forum. This was important enough that the Prime Minister and leader of the opposition were in attendance and gave speeches. A few days later the Asian Education Foundation  issued a release (PDF) about the drop in Asian language take-up in Australian schools. In fact this release is the announcement of the release of a number of reports about the current state of Asian languages in Australian schools. The timing is kind of curious because the reports were completed some time ago. A cynic might say that the government didn’t want to deliver further ammunition as to how poorly the current government initiative has worked, ahead of Kevin Rudd’s speech (video). There was no way of sugar coating it though, Asian language study in 2008 is 22% down over 2000 levels.

While this was supposed to be a blog post it turned into an extended essay. If you’re interested, click to read more.

Rudd’s speech curiously isn’t available in full text and neither is the full video. The opposition leader Tony Abbott’s is, however. As a disclosure I find the opposition party to be borderline racist (recent discussion around immigration) and lazily opportunistic when it comes to raising political debate. However it’s his job to take the government to task and I think he did it quite effectively in his speech;

Adelaide University’s Gerry Groot has identified one of the key problems: in high school, when hard choices have to be made about maximising tertiary entrance rankings, teachers, counsellors and parents will often tell students to drop languages – they are too much effort and too high-risk for too little likely reward.

The Prime Minister has promoted ‘Asia literacy’ as a key goal of his government but there is little reason to think that the National Asian Languages and Studies in Schools Program, launched in 2008, will reverse current trends.

I think the first paragraph is pretty good summary of the problem and the second reasonably points out that the government’s program looks to have been pretty ineffective. Abbott’s speech goes on to deliver a rhetoric about how a Liberal government would seek to reverse the trend but it’s weak on details.

The next Coalition government will work with the states to reconsider and to reinforce the weightings and other incentives which are supposed to encourage high school students to stick with foreign languages. Shortage of teachers means that it would be difficult to make foreign language study compulsory any time soon but our ultimate objective should be to ensure that every student has at least some familiarity with other languages and that a significant percentage have studied a foreign language through to school leaving.

I’d say this is characteristically weak on details and further saying that it’s simply “difficult” to make foreign language study compulsory is certainly true if you examine the Asialink reports about the state of Asian languages in Australian schools. Although I don’t see why you simply cannot state it as an objective and then work to that goal. In truth it would be politically difficult to do, particularly from the political party which is simultaneously scare mongering about the invading hordes of immigrants.

Reading though this I did, however, wonder if the Prime Minister’s well known Asian literacy is a help or a hindrance. While it’s true they enacted the NALSSP program, it’s being funded to the tune of $62.4 million over four years. That’s tiny. Only in the last month has it announced round 1 funding to schools. I took a look at the list and essentially it’s grants of $10 to $20k in order to enhance Asian study programs. This link shows the grants in Victorian schools. Eight of them seem to be directly language related and a glance through them does reveal some pretty awesome projects but really the bulk of the funding is going into larger projects intended to help on a national scale. There’s some great looking projects there which you can see by taking a look at the PDF, each is a bit less than half a million dollars so it’s significant.

This is worth looking at because it seems to me there is some real action going on here. For example UniMelb in conjunction with ANU is conducting a program to create online learning resources for Chinese language teachers. This is worth quoting what they’re doing:

Three national leaders in education are collaborating to produce multimedia Chinese language teacher education modules which targetthe specific learning challenges that Chinese presents to English speaking secondary and late primary school learners, taking into account the needs of both native speaker and non‐native speaker teachers. Delivered online, incorporating new technologies, the modules will provide new and experienced teachers with the specialist education in teaching Chinese language and culture they have not received. The result will be significantly higher quality of Chinese teaching in both content and delivery. Increasing student numbers in Chinese without first improving the quality of teaching will only mean increasing student numbers dropping out before the senior years.

There’s $455,900 allocated to this and I have to say it looks like a well targeted program featuring some good collaboration with national universities and curriculum organisations. There’s several more like it. So on the basis of that I think we can say that NALSSP is off to a pretty slow start and isn’t particularly well funded but it’s definitely doing good work.

It’s worth remembering that the doom and gloom figures for Asian languages are actually kind of old themselves and it’s going to take longer still until NALSSP initiatives start to have any impact at all. It’s difficult to see how Abbott can make the sweeping claim that “there is little reason to think (NALSSP) will reverse current trends”. Well maybe it wont, but it’s a tangible program with real stuff being done on the ground.

What Abbott did talk about (well, by quoting someone else anyway)  is the fact that language study is hard, and that there’s a tendency to drop the subject in order to ease workload with a view to scoring better for entry into universities. I think this a critical issue and it’s going to need more fundamental education review. The fact is languages *are* hard and they have an image problem too. I recently commented on an Australian story about the issue and there were a number posters that made claims about how languages were pointless and money should better go into other areas, like science and so on. Which is moronic but overall I think worth engaging with because attitude to Asian languages is definately part of the problem.

I see the heart of the problem as  follows; everyone acknowledges that there’s a solid case for upping the weighting and incentives supplied to the study of language. The problem is already 90% of those undertaking Asian languages are from background speaking homes. Anecdotally it doesn’t seem that high to me (in my classes) but the reports are pretty clear about it so I’ll bow to the research. At any rate native background speakers are an absolutely huge problem. Why? I’ll tell you why. They’re already very good at the subject. The way subjects evaluation works is that grades are dispensed on a ranking basis. It doesn’t matter if you take the world’s hardest subject. If you did middle of the pack in terms of performance, you will get a mid score. So you’d have to be an utter idiot to choose the hardest possible subject you can do (I don’t think that’s debatable) and one where most of the people in that class already possess much of the knowledge and skill.

How it’s supposed to work is that students are supposed to be split into streams. So all the background speakers get put into their own classes and the genuine beginners are in their own classes. For whatever reason this just doesn’t happen very effectively. My own classes have a majority of obviously background speaking students, presumably with Chinese parents, who have an excellent grasp of spoken Chinese. I’m kind of ambivalent about that myself, although it hurts because I need a big score in this subject and I was already playing catch up. Other non-Chinese background students, on the other hand, are actively hostile about it. We already know a vast number of students dropped the language already (90% attrition rate in Asian languages in high school!) so it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suggest this plays a substantial role.

There’s a few reasons for the failure of the streaming system which I think I can identify:

1. Critical mass: Some schools simply wont have the numbers to make it practical to run all the classes they ought to.
2. Unbalanced capability: I know students who ought to be in a higher level (than me) are not because their knowledge of academic language points such as grammar and written capability is not sufficient. However their spoken and listening capability is extremely high.
3. Students lie: They don’t want to be in a higher stream. They don’t want harder work, they want easier work. There are some students in my classes who absolutely fit this model, I have heard them discussing it.

(Just on that last point, there’s two students in my class who have Chinese parents and have a particularly high capability. I was in the lift with them as they went up to see the subject coordinator to beg not to be bumped up a class. This followed a class where the coordinator was explaining the exam proceed with a stark pointed warning that students very good at the language would be bumped up. I was baffled at the time why this would come up in the very last week of classes…)

Anyway, these problems exist. So if you lump on incentives to choose language, what you’re really doing is targeting all the people who are already speaking that language at home in order to by association target the vanishingly small number of non-background speakers who are actually brave enough to study the language. There’s a fair bit of debate about that already as seen in some of the raft of newspaper articles.

So what do you do about that? Well, Abbott certainly didn’t put forth an answer in his cursory knee-jerk manifesto. Say, for example, you did manage to stream perfectly so that basically you had a class full of non-Asians in a class and then you target all your incentives at them. They’re going to be predominantly white. Are we now saying that we encourage studying of language but only the white guys? That would be all kinds of bad even if  it’s actually pretty fair because those are the people you want to encourage the most.

Australia has a real problem here. We’re extremely reluctant to target people of a certain ethnicity, and doing so has a powerful history of creating resentment. I think this thorny issue is utterly critical to helping to address the problem, in addition to other massive problems like a lack of suitably trained teachers and so on.

There’s also one final area which I think is worth mentioning. The total body of knowledge one has to acquire in language is, I subject, vastly higher than any other subject you can do. In addition to that, you actually need to remorselessly train the practice of this knowledge into developing an extraordinarily difficult skill. This is so far removed from other subjects a student will choose at highschool that it’s a complete mystery to me why we then insist on essentially ramming this very large very square peg into a tiny round hole. The round hole means that even after years of study in high school the students that pass second language, particularly an Asian language, are still elementary at best. Which begs the fairly reasonable question of why you were doing it in the first place.

I think this is a critical question too. In the UK the only people I ran across who had studied another language (which invariably tended to be French), they would refer to it as “A level French” which I took to be synonymous with enough capability to utter the top ten phrases from one of those travelling language booklets. That’s not to say that it’s worthless someone studying a language which ultimately falls into disrepair. I mean you might as well say that about anything, I can’t remember ever using the mathematical techniques that I learned for example… you wouldn’t say it was useless though.

However the discussion about Asian languages is Australia is taken in the very particular context of Asian literacy. To provide tangible benefits to Australia through communication, business, relations and so on. If that is our aim then quite frankly something much more serious needs to be done. I’m talking about pretty epic measures, something like this:

1. Introduction of an Asian language at primary school.
2. Double the subject workload for non-background speakers. Eg. One language subject is two other subjects.
3. Severely modernised tertiary education systems with a compulsory element of immersion.

That’s pretty radical stuff but I think if you actually want a language major to come out of university and be capable in that language, this is what it takes. The double subject area I think is particularly critical. There’s precedent for this, when I was in highschool I did Maths I and Maths II as high school subjects. If you’re doing a language from beginner level I firmly believe there’s a case that it should be double the hours, double the credit, double everything. Certainly in years 11-12 anyway. I would forsee that European languages would still be significantly ahead at high school graduation which means this regime probably doesn’t need to be continued to tertiary schooling to attain functional use of language but it’s very likely that Asian languages would.

The last point I could write another massive essay on so I’ll leave that to another time. My point, overall, is that the government and opposition can do all the hand wringing they like. Newspapers can kick out as many depressing stories about the disastrous situation of Asian languages in schools as they like with the associated amateur analysis that seems to be the Australian press stock in trade. None of this will change anything until it’s understood that there are some fundamental education policies which need to be reviewed and beyond that a raft of extremely tricky logistical issues to tackle before we see any genuine headway.

Perhaps even before we start we should look inward a little and ask why it is that this situation has arisen in the first place. Do we have a fundamental lack of respect for the skill of multilingualism? Do we somehow think that it isn’t necessary to move towards the future with our Asian neighbors? Or maybe, what we’re saying, is that it’s all well and good but let’s leave it to those who had Chinese parents because our education system is ultimately incapable of rising to the challenge? That view, surely, cannot be allowed to prevail.