The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) is having a bit each way with the release yesterday of the draft curriculum for two languages from foundation classes up to Year 10.
Heralded by the CEO of ACARA, Robert Randall, as an “historic step”, the two languages are Italian and Chinese.
“We are that much closer to fulfilling one of the key promises of the Australian Curriculum, namely, that every school student in Australia will have the opportunity to study a language other than English.”
“In beginning with these two languages, we are recognising that Italian is one of the primary languages other than English spoken in Australian homes, while the draft Chinese curriculum brings us closer to fulfilling the goals of the Australia in the Asian Century White Paper.”
Italian is a beautiful language to speak and listen to. But the fact that many Australians of Italian background also speak it at home is not a sound rationale for including it as a priority language for the new curriculum. It is the first language of less than 1% of the world’s population.
Chinese is spoken by more Australians at home than any other language (372,000) but neither should that be the reason for including it as a priority in the curriculum. More to the point is the fact that it is spoken by more than 14% of the entire world, and is the most spoken first language on earth.
Surprisingly, for many, Spanish is number two – because it is not only spoken in Spain, but much of the South American continent and is the first language of many Americans. Just on 6% of the world has Spanish as their first language.
English is 3rd with 5.5% of the world, followed by Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Indonesian and Japanese rounding out the top 10.
Mr Randall said ACARA is currently developing new curriculum for three of these languages – Arabic, Indonesian and Japanese. Along with Chinese and Korean, Indonesian and Japanese were identified as key languages in the Federal Government’s White Paper on the Asian Century.
Other new curriculum being developed is for Spanish, Vietnamese, French, German and Greek. Both Vietnamese and Greek are spoken by more than 275,000 Australians at home. Vietnamese is a language spoken by around 1.1% of the world’s population, while Greek is spoken by less than 0.2% of the world’s population.
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