The Sydney Morning Herald – Kelsey Munro
“Kurt Mullane, the executive director of the Asia Education Foundation, said “one of our great challenges is our monolingual mindset”. “We think English will be enough, that it’s got us this far and it will treat us well into the future,” he said. “But the world has changed rapidly. If you are a monolingual speaker these days, you are well and truly in a minority in a global context. Our education sector is still playing catch up to that.” Despite millions being pumped into promoting foreign language learning in schools in the past decade, the slide has continued. Asian languages, treated as a priority by successive governments, are faring particularly badly. In 2005, 1524 NSW students took Chinese at HSC level; in 2015, when there were 12,000 more year 12 students, that number was 832. Butof most those were native Chinese speakers and only 153 were studying it as a second language.”(more)