Our language inheritance begins with Australia’s traditional owners, who endowed us with hundreds of rich and ancient languages, and continues many years later, where waves of immigrants brought with them languages from around the world. This motion recognises that together as a people we are united through our common language, English, but moreover this motion recognises and supports immigrants and indigenous Australians who speak languages other than English and encourages them to retain these languages, as they acquire English.
In addition to recognising the importance of learning English, this motion also recognises the profound and lasting benefits of second language learning to individuals and to the nation. These benefits include intellectual development, with extensive scientific studies demonstrating that bilingual skills attained by young children can contribute to enhancing their cognitive functioning.
Further studies show that language competence can improve cultural vitality or sensitivity through enhanced cultural insight, awareness, understanding and tolerance. In addition, benefits can be derived in trade and commerce through understanding, penetrating and servicing new markets.
In recent years, in both the UK and the USA, national evaluations of language competence of the populations have been conducted. In both cases, it is recognised that a more unstable and insecure international environment makes it imperative for more citizens to know more languages. To that end, it is now recognised by the education system that they must mount a serious and continuous learning program, so a wide range of languages are encouraged and supported as part of a long term approach to language planning. Similar arguments apply Mr DS to Australia.
Australia has a good tradition of teaching languages and developing resources. Interestingly, we also have a reputation for expertise in this area.
For decades now, languages other than English have been included in school curriculum’s and the variety of languages around us has also broadened greatly; from traditional European languages such as French, to the languages of immigrant communities, such as Greek and Italian, to the languages of our neighbours and business partners, such as Indonesian and Japanese.
This motion recognises that despite successive government policies on language learning, we have not really succeeding in reaping the maximum benefits of the multilingual resources of the Australian people.
Had we seen bilingualism and multilingualism as our greatest tools for enhancing democracy, cultural awareness, intellectual development, trade and diplomacy, and had we recognised that young children are capable of absorbing several languages, we would be in the same situation as Europe, where learning several languages is a central aspect of education, providing them with vast future opportunities.
So Mr DS, In comparison to other nations, Australia’s multi language skills rate very poorly. Although there are many such as myself, capable of conversing in a second language, many other Australians never get the opportunity or support to learn languages to a fluent level, because language learning is seen as an issue for ethnic communities only. We still see ourselves as a pre-dominantly mono-lingual society despite our multilingual inheritance.
And it has not always been easy to gain government support and funding. In recent years no new funding has been given to language programs or institutions, instead there have been cuts backs and the abolition of existing and highly successful programs, such as the National Asian Languages Program and the National Language Institute of Australia.
It is imperative that we improve our efforts on language learning. We need to do this in a well-funded, comprehensive policy that strengthens English skills and also actively builds skills in languages other than English.
As such, this motion recognises that Australia should develop a National Policy on Languages based on the principals of ‘English Plus’, which can be expressed as achieving the four “E”s: enrichment, economics, equality and external gain.
A committed language policy would see languages other than English become core subjects and no longer subject to curriculum cuts.
