Australia announces boost to Asian language teaching
Updated
The Australian government has also announced major investment into Asian language teaching. Over the next three years, 59 million US dollars will be provided as extra funding for Asian language studies in Australian schools.
Presenter: Bo Hill
Speaker: Kathe Kirbe, executive director, Asia Education Foundation; Robert Cribb, president, Asian Studies Association of Australia; Ai Miyagawa, Japanese language teacher.
Australian Education Minister, Julia Gillard, calls it "engaging with people in our region to build a more secure and economically strong nation". Further funding for Asian language studies was announced in Tuesday nights Australian budget to the tune of 59 million US dollars. It's a small but significant part of billions of dollars committed towards education in Australia in the short and long term.
Kathe Kirbe, the executive director of the Asia Education Foundation in Australia has welcomed the extra money.
KIRBE: I'm enormously encouraged by this budget announcement and I think it's going to make a really good contribution to equipping our children for their future.
HILL: Equipping those children, says Kathe Kirby, living in a region of the world that is booming.
KIRBE: We've still got a long way to go. Our school curriculum in Australia is still predominantly Euro-centric. So we're making quite profound changes here in the content of school curriculum with a goal to equip our students for an increasingly interconnected world in which the Asian region will play a central role.
HILL: While the region booms, a particular focus has been on the opportunities within East Asia. Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indonesian are the major Asian languages taught in Australian schools - but they're competing with French, German and Italian. And the instances of other Asian languages courses, including that of a booming India which Australia is courting for economic reasons, have decreased.
In 2002, the Asian Studies Association of Australia published a report that showed less than five per cent of university students were learning anything about Asia, fewer than three per cent were studying an Asian language. And from 15 institutions teaching Indian studies in the 1980s, only five offered such courses by the turn of the century. President of the Asian Studies Association, Robert Cribb, says while Chinese and Japanese studies are still popular, the new funding will hopefully raise the profile of others.
CRIBB: Southeast Asian studies and South Asian studies have not been doing particularly well, and there's been a retreats at many universities. It's partly because of the economic crisis in Indonesia and the political difficulties there which have been compounded by the travel warnings from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade which make it very difficult for exchange programs to get off the ground.
And it's partly because the China boom has sucked a certain amount of attention from other parts of Asia. But, as I understand it at least part of this new funding is intended to be invested in a serious investigation of policy possibilities and in the best way of building up the levels of expertise that Australia needs. So I'm reasonably confident that in the process of policy formation, South and Southeast Asia will get appropriate attention.
HILL: While the new funding is welcomed, it doesn't replace, however, one age-old problem. Ai Miyagawa is a Japanese language teacher in the south-eastern Australian city of Melbourne. She says no matter what language or subject, teenagers would still prefer to be somewhere else beside the classroom.
MIYAGAWA: I have a difficulty because I teach at a high school and up to Year 9 language is compulsory and not all the students want to learn, so it's difficult to teach someone who don't want to learn.
HILL: Kathe Kirbe from the Asia Education Foundation says more people like Ai Miyagawa are needed - native speakers willing to teach in Australia or more incentive for young graduates to take on Asian language studies as part of their teacher training in Australia.
KIRBE: This is our region, our neighbourhood and our students, our future citizens need to have a much greater level of knowledge and understanding and skills to interact with our region.
