Comments on: Bilingual students at the crossroads

By: The long conversation: Australia and China | Language on the Move

The long conversation: Australia and China | Language on the Move — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 05:03:33 +0000

[…] as the streams do not run consistently throughout. (Australia is not alone in this regard; Livia Gerber recently wrote on this site about barriers to bilingualism for students in […]

By: Livia

Livia — Sun, 23 Nov 2014 01:01:23 +0000

Hi Shiva,
Interesting point. I haven’t looked into ‘how’ foreign languages are taught, but I have read up on ‘which’ languages have been promoted and prioritised since the first official language policy was published in 1987. Basically, French, German and Japanese have been the most taught languages in the Australian education system. I agree with the quote you posted by Kenner and Ruby (2012), community languages have been neglected. It seems to me, that although the value of multilingualism has been acknowledged, not much has been done to encourage children and young adults to learn languages to a point where they feel confident in conversing with native speakers of the target language. Personally, I feel that the foreign language classroom would benefit from teaching our children English grammar first, before expecting them to wrap their heads around the grammar of a foreign language.

By: Shiva

Shiva — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 07:29:06 +0000

Thank you for this fascinating post, Livia!
It strikes me of my recent discovery that in the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) scoring system, some foreign languages have a maximum attainable subject score! The question is that how foreign languages are treated/taught at primary and secondary schools in Australia? In the same article, Budach (2014, 535) quotes Kenner and Ruby (2012), “schools as institutions are part of a wider society that ignores and devalues community languages”. On the other hand, “parents and children are given to understand that possessing… ‘linguitic capital’…will lead to success in the job market, access to powerful social networks, and high status knowledge and qualifications”!