Macquarie U wants to cut its Modern Greek course (along with other European languages) and expand global studies, which the OECD describes as “a set of cognitive, social, and emotional skills required to engage in meaningful and productive interactions in an interconnected and diverse world.”
Languages are a hard sell for universities, what with insufficient demand and translation technology that already meets the utility needs of travellers and basic business.
And not just here. Total languages other than English enrolments at US colleges and universities dropped 16 per cent in the five years to 2021, according to the US Modern Languages Association. Korean was up 30 per cent off a low base, to 20 000 but Mandarin Chinese declined 14 per cent.
There are attempts to arrest the decline. In 2022 a consortium of ten Australian universities launched a social media campaign to encourage study of Indonesian, Mandarin, Italian, Japanese, French and Spanish.
But overall, nothing seems to stop the rot and it seems that in the absence of a return to government promoting learning languages, especially those of our neighbours, there is not much to be done. Especially given the already parlous pipeline from schools here. There were 20,000 Y 12 LOTE students in 2021 out of out of 234,000 Y 12 students.
Plus, AI translation resources will continue to reduce the case for languages.
As Xong Zhao, from the University of Melbourne’s Graduate School of Education puts it; “Despite teachers’ great and hard work and students’ genuine interests and efforts, most of the students are far from competent after one or four or even ten school years. … In comparison to today’s machine translation, which is far from perfect, the majority of students are unable to do as well as translation machines in communicating with native speakers of the target language.”
It is, he suggests, time to re-think courses in learning languages other than English to focus on global competence, “cultures and issues beyond one’s own culture in local communities.” PISA includes “global competence” as a core competency and given crowded curricula, the place to teach it is in the space now occupied by languages.
Macquarie U already teaches, Modern Greek International Studies, which is set in the context of the language. But the top outcome is, “understand histories of global mobility, contemporary global trends, and processes of the formation of the Modern Greek nation, and reflect on their own experiences of mobility and belonging.”
