'More Australian children should learn Chinese' - report
Updated
The University of Melbourne has published a report on the teaching of standard Chinese or Mandarin in Australian schools. The report found that at the end of last year, less than a fifth of all Australians working in China could speak Mandarin, and just one in ten had ever studied a China-related subject. The report's authors say last year, only three per cent of Year 12 students in Australia were studying Chinese - and almost all of them were already native Mandarin speakers. The Australian education sector says it is now looking at ways to increase the number of students in Australia who study Chinese.
Presenter: Christine Webster
Speaker: Dr Jane Orton, author of the report, "Chinese Language Education in Australia"
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JANE ORTON: Well from the beginning we'd say, of course, that learning a language in school is good educationally but the question then becomes which language we learn or which language we present, and this has been always according to historical ties or local community groups, regional proximity, trade and social interaction, and the premise of the report is that, on these grounds, China has become more important than, really, than any other country and that this is a new situation, and then, as a result of that, we need a good pool of competent users of Chinese and a smaller pool of highly competent users of the language, who have strong socio-cultural understanding. And the fact is that we don't have anything like that. That's where it began and, in fact, it shows that the Chinese is the smallest of any of the languages taught in our schools nationally by a long, long way.
CHRISTINE WEBSTER: Your report suggests hardly any European Australians are choosing to study Chinese.
JANE ORTON: Oh, no, to continue. Quite a lot of them begin. We've got something like 84,000 Australians in total studying Chinese around the country, but that drops to 4,500 by Year 12 and of that group only about 400 are not Chinese.
CHRISTINE WEBSTER: Why are they deciding to not continue with their studies after a certain time?
JANE ORTON: Three reasons. One - and it's the primary reason that kids continue with things at school - and the fact is that they find that they can't do well The non-background Chinese are absolutely overwhelmed by the number of competent background-speakers and immigrants, first-language speakers, from Chinese societies, and so, you know, they don't enjoy it and then, also, of course, it's very bad for Year 12 scores and so they drop out usually at the end of Year 9, even at the end of Year 10. The second reason is that learning Chinese is much more challenging for an English speaker. The American Foreign Service Institute estimates it takes about 3.5 times longer to become proficient than say for us to become proficient in Spanish or Italian or German, and so it is quite a slog. And, at the same time, it's not been terribly well researched and so to date it's still not been terribly well taught.
CHRISTINE WEBSTER: And I believe there are quite a lot of people going to work in China but they really don't have the language skills. What kind of problems is this causing?
JANE ORTON: Well, to date, it hasn't mattered quite so much because they've been able to draw on Chinese to do their interpreting and their research for them, but of course that has meant that they're very dependent on not just on Chinese but they're usually very young Chinese, they're usually 30 years old or something like that, who are bright but who may not have the same experience as a 45-year-old who's got to make big decisions about lots of money. And, so, it means that they can't really run their own businesses. Now, to date, very often they haven't had to do much of that because they're mostly working in the export end of things with international clients or working for each other, so they're doing the legal work for some other company - European or foreign company - but the difference is that now they're going to start to need to get involved in the Chinese domestic economy, and that means that they really are going to need not just language but good language and a very good understanding of the social reality.
