Current+Issues


 * Mandarin will be the first languages developed for the curriculum

The Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) issued its final shape paper for languages in the curriculum in November 2011. Announce that Italian and Mandarin will be the first languages developed for the curriculum and 13 other languages are under consideration for the next stage. The spokesman for the federal Minister for School Education Peter Garrett pointed out that all kids will be entitled to learn a language from kindergarten onwards. Research shows that in Victoria primary students spend 700 hours in learning languages (Stevenson, 2011). These indicate a great number of language teachers as well as resources will be commanded in the future across the state.


 * Chinese is a “difficult language”

However, Chinese is regarded as a “difficult language” to be taught among both young non-background speakers and native speakers. It is not cognate with English since Chinese does not have any alphabet but uses a logo graphic system for its written language and stress and intonation patterns are different. Unlike English, Chinese is a tone language, which means that it uses the pitch (highness or lowness) of a phoneme sound to distinguish word meaning. Therefore many educators like Kirkpatrick (1995) argued that this so-called difficult language should not be taught at primary school level to non-background speakers because it takes the learners around four times as long to attain basic proficiency as learners of easier languages such as French or German.


 * Poor student engagement

I have been teaching Mandarin in a Chinese weekend school for a year. I have 24 Grade 1 students (2 of them are only 5-year-old) sitting in the traditional classroom. They could only manage themselves to listen quietly for the first 5 minutes and they are easily to be distracted by any little things. At the end of every class, I was exhausted and I lost my voice. The students, however, were also tired and off-task. I did a survey shows that nearly 90% of the students come to language school under parents’ pressure and about one third of the students think Chinese is too difficult to learn and it is not important to them. This problem happens to many of my colleagues' class as well. Students lost interest in learning their mother tongue and only do it for parents’ expectation.


 * References:**

Stevenson, A. (2011, November 22), //Primary school languages plan hits resistance//. The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved from [|http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/primary-school-languages-plan-hits-resistance-20111121-1nr1h.html#ixzz1pozMh0Pa]

Kirkpatrick, A. (1995). //Learning Asian languages in Australia: Which languages and when?// Babel, 30(1), 4-11, 26-29.