Globalization has been given great emphasis in schools all over the world and one of its instruments to be in full bloom is knowledge of languages. Language learning is one of the most popular educational activities students in the primary, secondary and tertiary levels engage themselves into in order to heighten their potential and increase their opportunities in the future. However, languages have become a less popular study choice for students in Adelaide, Australia. The drop in the number of language students over the years have been attributed to a shortage of qualified language teachers and resources rather than a lack of interest from students.

The latest results of studies in Adelaide show that there is a thirteen percent drop in the number of final year students studying a language other than English from 2,029 in the year 2004 to 1,765 in 2008. The most popular language being learned in Adelaide in 2008 was Chinese and the other popular Asian languages were Japanese, Vietnamese and Indonesian respectively. A lot of students who ventured into languages also studied German, Italian, French, Modern Greek and Spanish.

The president of the SA Secondary Principals Association, Jim Davies, has said that principals were dedicated in encouraging language study but it had become increasingly difficult for them to find fluent language teachers.

Now is the time when a lot of students are interested in learning languages other than English principally Asian languages. Since there is a shortage of teachers, one of the proposed solutions in the future is to create partnerships between schools and have students travel across campuses to make economically viable classes.

A $68 million fund was promised by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in April 2007 to reduce the decline of foreign languages with focus on Asian languages.

Wouldn’t it be better if we suggest that those who learn languages and become fluent in them should also try going into further study and become language teachers themselves? If we do not look into the matter of providing quality and qualified language teachers, there is a tendency that there will be a steady decline of language learners and possibly the demise of language learning.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 8:00 am and is filed under Language News, Language Schools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.