Abstract
The provisioning of community languages in Australian education has had a long and successful history when judged in the context of the number of specific languages being offered and assessed at senior secondary level in the formal examinations that provide the basis for entrance to tertiary education. However, although this provisioning is a direct result of languages policies that supported linguistic and cultural diversity in a nation with a history of migration, policies for teaching the languages of migrants have not been sustained. At the same time, the current context of complex diversity and globalized multilingualism prompts a reconsideration of the very nature and orientation of language learning (Stroud & Heugh. Languages in education. In R. Mesthrie (Ed.), Cambridge handbook of sociolinguistics (pp. 413–429). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). In this chapter, I consider briefly some dimensions of the provision for community languages in Australian education, highlighting the provisioning and the efforts on the part of communities to gain legitimacy for their languages and cultures, the complexity of national collaboration that has made it possible, and issues related to the nature and quality of programs. I then propose a reconceptualization of the learning goals and pedagogies for the learning of community languages. Both are necessary to ensure that they remain a distinctive form of provision in languages education in Australia and that this provision is responsive to the diverse and dynamic affiliations, desires, and expectations of learners of these languages in contemporary times. I conclude with a reflection on necessary research that would sustain the provision of community languages.
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Notes
- 1.
“Community languages” is the term used to refer to the specific languages used by immigrant communities in Australia. The term originated as part of the advocacy in the 1970s to expand languages provision beyond the prestige foreign languages that had been available (see Lo Bianco 2014). It is essentially the equivalent to the term “heritage languages” in the USA, though the Australian term does not also include the revitalization of languages or the languages of indigenous people.
- 2.
The author was also the author of the Shape Paper for the Australian Curriculum – Languages.
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Appendix 1
Appendix 1
School of Languages and Ethnic Schools (South Australia) Student Enrolment Data, 2016 (Reproduced by Permission)
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Scarino, A. (2016). A Reconsideration of the Distinctive Role of Heritage Languages in Languages Education in Australia. In: Trifonas, P., Aravossitas, T. (eds) Handbook of Research and Practice in Heritage Language Education. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38893-9_31-1
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