University students are being urged to add a foreign language to their program of study as experts call for a national strategy to boost the uptake of language other than English.
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A group of passionate academics and language advocates have backed a new campaign after the previous government's job-ready graduates reforms slashed the cost of fees from $6808 to $3700 per year.
Australian Consortium for in Country Indonesian Studies director Liam Prince said language courses were on the chopping block in the past two years as universities tried to curb pandemic-induced financial losses.
Mr Prince wrote letter after letter to faculty deans and vice-chancellors pleading for them to not close down Indonesian language classes.
The response he was given usually pointed to the enrolments falling through the floor.
Ten universities contributed to the modest $100,000 national languages campaign to entice university students to add language courses to their degrees.
"It was out of a desire to do something direct and go to the root cause of the problem and try and improve the conditions that those faculty deans and vice-chancellors were looking at when they were considering whether to maintain language programs," Mr Prince said.
While there are widespread reservations on whether lower fees for students would guide them towards areas of national priority, Mr Prince said there wasn't enough awareness of the reforms to make them effective.
"Given the parlous state of enrolments in languages across the Australian higher ed sector, there was a sense of urgency, we need to do something and make use of the policy initiative that we've been given," he said.
Australia has long faced the contradiction of having a multicultural society, with more than one-quarter of Australians born overseas, but very low enrolment in language programs.
In 2013, about 33,000 Australian students were learning a language at university.
In 2020 this had dropped to about 25,000.
Australian National University chair of modern European languages professor Catherine Travis said it should be a national priority to lift the numbers of people with multiple languages.
"Australians who don't have family backgrounds from other countries do tend to be monolingual. There's not a lot of support given for languages. There's not a lot of promotion given to languages," she said
"The fact that languages at school are often offered on the same line as other electives such as cooking and woodwork suggests a lack of priority for them."
The most popular languages taught at ANU are French, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese.
Prof Travis said English speakers often assumed they could travel and work around the world in their mother tongue, but there was also a risk of things getting lost in translation.
"It really opens your mind to another world, different ways of expressing things, different words for different concepts," she said.
"It also opens you up to a whole range of literature and films and music in other languages ... you just can't get the nuances of some of that in translation."
At the ANU, a language can be studied as major over three years of an undergrad degree, it can be a four-subject minor or students can do a diploma in language which adds one year to the degree.
School-leavers get up to five bonus ATAR points if they have studied languages to a year 12 level and get over a certain score at certain universities.
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Prof Travis said more support was needed for Australian indigenous languages and some lesser-studied dialects that would be important for international relations.
"We certainly need a lot of speakers of other languages that are now or will become major world languages. We need vast numbers of speakers of Chinese, Indonesian, Spanish and Portuguese," she said.
If the digital campaign to drive enrolments in language is able to move the needle a little bit in the right direction, Mr Prince hopes more universities will put resources into a larger campaign next year.