Professor Xu highlighted the importance of teaching those languages which are spoken by native speakers living in Australia. In that way, language learning becomes more relevant for the community and provides a language which is instrumental in the interaction with other Australian citizens. Mandarin, Italian and Arabic are the most commonly spoken languages in the country, while Mandarin, Punjabi and Tagalog are the fastest growing ones, but these are not the languages which are most widely taught. According to Xu, this completely new approach to language learning and multilingual classrooms would do more to motivate language learning among students than any of the changes which could be introduced by the Australian Curriculum Review which will be released by the middle of this month.
A Multilingual Population
Many are expecting the changes introduced by the Curriculum Review to help hundreds of Australian children retain their mother tongues, which they speak at home but tend to lose as years go by. Approximately a third of Australian students speak a language other than English at home and, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, over 18 per cent of the total population speaks a foreign mother tongue.
The Importance of Informing Parents
Nisrine El-Choueifati, from Ethnic Child Care Family and Community Services, highlighted the advantages brought about by the ability to speak a second language, which include flexibility, creativity and better problem solving skills. She also stated that language learning is often impeded by parents themselves, who often feel guilty or afraid of hindering school learning as a consequence of misinformation. The greatest problem related to this misinformation is that the ideas held by parents are very hard to modify.