Languages reports

History, scale of operation, support base, nature of the student group, rationale, teacher profile – these are fundamentals in which there are many marked differences across the four languages.

In 2009, the Australian Government commissioned the Asia Education Foundation to research and produce detailed reports outlining the current situation in Australian schools with relation to three of the languages targeted by the National Asian Languages and Studies in Schools Program – Indonesian, Japanese and Korean. Chinese had already been the subject of such a study in 2008 by the Melbourne Graduate School of Education and Melbourne Confucius Institute.

Summary and overview

The Current State of Asian Language Education Summary (PDF, 201 kb) provides a snapshot of the key issues and recommendations tabled in each report.

The overview (PDF, 1.3 Mb) provides:

• access to key elements of the findings of the four reports
• an overview of the issues they raise
• suggested responses to those issues to guide and direct thinking about appropriate action by education systems and schools.

Full reports

	Chinese The Current State of Chinese Language Education in Australian Schools (3.6 Mb) How best attract those learning Chinese as a second language, who cannot compete at senior secondary levels with native speakers?			Indonesian The Current State of Indonesian Language Education in Australian Schools (1.9 Mb) How can Indonesian, now an ‘at risk’ language in Australian schools without a significant advocacy group, arrest a steep decline?
	Japanese The Current State of Japanese Language Education in Australian Schools (1.2 Mb) How does a ‘big’ language capitalise on its strengths while addressing issues which have led to its decline?			Korean The Current State of Korean Language Education in Australian Schools ( 2.3 Mb) With just 69 Korean teachers across Australia, what conditions will allow a ‘small’ language to grow?

All four reports provide detailed insight into the situation of their topic language and are an invaluable resource to inform the future of Asian languages in Australian schools. The reports draw attention to the fact that, while at a broad strategic level the four languages have similar (but not the same) issues and requirements, their situations are very different.

Academic experts in each language area developed the reports:

• Chinese Dr Jane Orton, University of Melbourne
• Indonesian Michelle Kohler (University of South Australia) and Dr Phillip Mahnken (University of Sunshine Coast)
• Japanese Anne de Kretser and Dr Robyn Spence-Brown (Monash University)
• Korean Dr Seong-Chul Shin (University of New South Wales).

 Read other reports

• The AEF has commissioned a number of reports on the implementation of Studies of Asia in schools. View more research in our For Teachers’ section