 For our evening today is the first seminar of the new year and it really is a great pleasure for me personally to introduce to you Professor Ann Pouls who I know of many years ago because I was teaching a course on gender and language in Budapest for about four or five years and one of her articles on gender and language learning and language use was a very key article for some of my students so it was a very inspiring article because I was trying to talk about some of the work I was doing on language reform and how one should avoid using sexist language and Ann had said a number of things and she's written an enormous amount just to give you a brief idea she is currently Dean of Faculty of Arts, she's the head of the College of Arts and Law at Birmingham she was before in Australia where she was a Dean of Faculty of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of West Australia she was a professor of linguistics there and held many many senior posts at Monarch University, the University of New Moon, Wurrungong and her research actually focuses on the kind of thing that I'm really really interested in issues of social identity, language and society and post-culture which can be valued she's done really groundbreaking enormous studies of all the languages and language learning and teaching in Australia and she's written a lot of other things across the world too with some very very amazing researchers and she's a very long CV, I'm not going to go into the whole CV at the moment from my point of view I'm very much into those of you who know my work and very much into the languages of minorities particularly immigrant and indigenous minorities wherever they are across the world and I've been doing a lot of work on community languages over the last few years while I've been at SOAS and I met Ann a couple of years ago when it came to one of our conferences on community languages and I was so delighted because you know I only knew the name and actually not only was I delighted, I was a bit apprehensive when we were talking about some of our work she knows a lot more than most of us, certainly me, about community languages so I'm not going to say much more about her work, I think if that's what she says it and she's going to talk to you today about community languages, sometimes called heritage languages in higher education and she's going to talk about the initiatives from Australia Thank you very much, it's always embarrassing to hear your own introduction but I suppose we need to learn to listen gracefully and thankful for that I just had a brief conversation with one of the people coming tonight and that alerted me to something that Bitesh has also pointed out People are familiar with the term heritage and community because they are indeed, they're the same, different names depending on the geographical region you're working so heritage is much more the name for minority languages in Northern America, especially Canada whereas community languages I think is also more familiar here I just wanted to make clear in case people didn't know that Okay, good, so I'd like to do three things tonight One is I'm going to give you a snapshot of the linguistic diversity in Australia It's not as diverse as Britain but then you have, or I should say we have, I would work here now more than 60 million people, Australia has been barely 20 million people so the linguistic diversity is going to be somewhat different The second thing I will briefly talk about is language policy in Australia because ultimately you may be as rich in languages as you can be and I think most pilots of the world are always told Iceland and Portugal are the only minority in the world I don't think that's true but anyway If you don't have a policy that generates ideas about and praises or let's say tolerates molten English then it will disappear more or less within the generation or even, as you can hear from my accent, even within the first generation Dutch around the world disappears within the generation that moves to another country I think they want to win the prize of the quickest assimilation ever Interesting isn't it because they're actually one of the most multilingual groups in Europe many Dutch people speak two or three languages which is still quite amazing in the European context So my second part is very briefly something about language policy The third part then deals specifically with universities what is happening with languages in university and I will run past you, not in a massive, in a very quick way but I will give you at the moment three models that have not been invented in Australia but that have been fairly well tested in Australia to collaborate between universities in order to maintain 90% of the languages that actually are not seen as popular in typical university terms meaning they don't break even I'm sorry, occasionally use of business like terms because unfortunately universities have become enterprises and especially I assume many of you have something to do with languages the two things that always come up is you cost too much and you haven't got enough people but you're very important for the institution key learning outcome, language, but to us So I'm going to talk about three models that have been tested in Australia not entirely new, but I will give you some clues why they work and why some others that are still in place only work on and if I'll use then a sexist term on the gentleman's agreement as such So that's the sort of organization of my talk you can interrupt me at any time but I wouldn't mind if the chair could give me an indication of how long I can talk Excellent, that's good Okay, so let's start with a little bit around the I'll just sit down if you can see what's slightly better So, okay, Australia does have a census and the census has a language question Unfortunately the language question keeps changing so comparing from one census to another is difficult but the last four censuses have had the question what languages do you speak at home? So on the basis of that there is no testing in census about what speaking means or what using means, but it's basically there but in fact 70% of Australians over the age of five say that they speak a language other than English in their home more or less on a regular basis that has actually gone up so initially it was about 30% so over 10 years time for an entire population to go from 30% to 70% is quite amazing We then have, and that's probably not comparable to what Britain has more than 350 languages spoken in Australia Now, can I say there's probably more but the census only allowed for 350 to be processed and many of these are actually Indigenous languages so of the 350, about 160 are languages that have been transported into Australia from around the world but Indigenous languages being Australian and regional languages to some extent are straight Ireland languages make up the majority but some of the colleagues here at SOAS will also know most of these languages have communities of less than 20 speakers so the focus for that is on a race against time to record the languages and with some of the big ones to see to what extent younger people want to learn or relearn the language Unfortunately, and I apologise in advance unfortunately I will say very little about Australian languages in higher education for two reasons One, there is very very little there Secondly, it is a more politicised issue in the sense that depending on the university you're at it is seen as an independent issue therefore Aboriginal languages are there for Aboriginal people and that's the group that will teach them and that will learn them in some ways people who are not able to either self-identify or being identified by the group as being entitled to access that will not happen so there are actually colleagues here at SOAS who know far more about Australian Aboriginal languages than I do so I'll leave that aside Just briefly then, in terms of those sort of community languages that have come in from outside At the moment the top ten languages are Chinese I must say I have done something that linguists should never do and that is put together the various Chinese dialects so this contains Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien as the major languages Italian, Greek, Arabic, Vietnamese, Spanish, Tagalog or Filipino, I have that stroke basically because the way in which to get people on the census self-identified it worked out that in most cases it was actually Tagalog but some had said Filipino and not many had said the language German in the equation if you look then 30 years ago it was a very different perspective of course that is the result of migration patterns Italian continues to be a very strong language and Greek too but most of the others other European languages have fallen off the bottom of the top ten languages one of the most amazing ones is actually German but it has still a fairly large community in Australia but there is almost no language language so the next thing I want to basically I'm not doing here a lecture on language language so I'm only picking up those things that are important in looking at what happens with those languages in higher education what I have set out in the next overhead however is those languages that have a very young profile it says quite clearly there this is the percentage of speakers that are under the age of 14 meaning the language is spoken by people in another age group if you look at languages like Arabic, Vietnamese, Cantonese Mandarin, Spanish, Greek and Italian you can see what percentage of the overall population in that group claiming to use the language what their age profile is so actually Arabic and Vietnamese are young languages meaning they have a large group of people who speak the language who are under 14 years of age so the importance of that is that if these languages if these students and their parents are interested in language maintenance these will be the languages that will be of demand from a community sense not from a security sense in the community at primary, secondary level and later on at university level the two languages that Italian has dropped substantially so there's a very small group of Italian second and third generation that still maintains the language Greek is a language that's been in Australia for a long period of time and it's quite strong but that's the case here in Britain too it's the case in America Greek people really are very language oriented if we look at the old profile the number of people over the age of 55 claiming to be a speaker of Latvian is very high so there are almost no young people speaking Latvian in Australia Lithuanian, Dutch, Ukrainian, German so the entire population the entire group might still be 200,000 people but of these 200,000 people 67% are over the age of 55 they have not passed on the language to the second or third generation which means that by the time they pass there will be virtually no demand for that language from a community perspective and that I think is the important one from a linguistic angle so that's sort of the situation we've got in Australia now I've highlighted and if you want some questions around that I'm very happy to answer clearly there is substantial difference in language maintenance patterns in communities I've already highlighted Greeks do see language as very important it doesn't mean that their proficiency in Greek is that high but they give a very high rating to the importance of having language passed on to the next generation just an anecdote if you talk, I'm not sure whether there are any speakers here I hope this counts too but my own research on Greek was especially with second generation saying what was your most pleasant and your least pleasant experience to do with the Greek language and the least pleasant was I had to go to Saturday school doing Greek lessons almost in a group of about 500 and they all said that I then would also ask the question what would you like to see your children do and almost all said I've got to go to Greek school it's horrible but you must do it as a Greek you've got to go to Greek school so it is interesting to see and in fact it is true the third and the fourth generation still will send their children to Greek school that's not the case for Italians that's not the case for some other groups they will probably move faster in terms of language shift than initially expected because they are much more willing to move away yet the means does not seem to be that important in their ethnolinguistic makeup some other groups are much more interested that's another lecture about those sorts of things but I did want to point out that there are substantial variations let's now look at the language policy issues like any country there have been massive fluctuations in how countries have dealt with as they are called in the US aliens or migrants or people who settle from outside now the person who probably has written most about that in an Australian context will be known to some of you he is Joseph Lobjanko I've got his name there because he was also the architect of the first national policy on languages so in the very early days of well at least white Australia settlements there was an enormous variety and quite a lot of tolerance over the world wars that tolerance moved from tolerance to actually banning of languages Germans banned for a very long period of time and depending on how social and political relations worked you had periods where there was tolerance but no support and other periods especially around the late 1980s where it was actually an issue of celebrating the English diversity it is that moment around the late 1980s that actually partly as a result of pressure groups made up of immigrant groups but especially also language scholars I must say in Australia language scholars have been very very active in language so that there is probably and I don't compare with Britain there's probably not such an enormous distance between those who research language and those who are actually on the barricades trying especially applied to this are always at the forefront of trying to not only help make policy and shape it but also implement it so around that time with these particular pressure groups a particular minister was convinced that it would be in the interest of the government to at least have some form of overview of what is actually happening in Australia and so initially what was done was the language survey how many languages are there what are the needs of the various groups and that came to the formulation that is known as a national policy of languages with four main principles now in my last point I said there have been many reiterations and variations since then but what has been maintained is those four principles so English for all started off very clearly that English has to be a language that is spoken by all people there was an understanding that some people needed to be assisted to be able to learn English rather than simply well you're in this country to learn English I make that point because in the 1960s it was assumed and those of you who have worked with language it was assumed that adults needed some learning of language which usually occurred on the boat with a little booklet and that was basically it however it was also assumed that children will learn language by pure possibilities you throw them into a classroom and they will learn it in fact quite a few of them did learn and didn't sink they were swamped quite well but it was in the late 1980s that it was seen important for the maintenance of bilingualism that actually child migrants got proper English classes as well so English for all is still absolutely at the forefront of principles obviously that has been interpreted over the years and some of you may have heard versions of British nationalism it had a name at some stage the name of the woman Pauline Hansen Hansenism it was and that was basically English for all and English for all so obviously that's changed but certainly that's dead what has not changed at all either is a second language for all so it is actually a principle of all policies that there should be encouragement for everyone to have access to a second language now this is the principle you then have the practice so in the 1980s and in the 1990s a lot of money was made available through government programs to basically have incentives for those who do not speak a second language to learn one those who did have a second language through either community language or an Aboriginal language to maintain that over time the funding of that aspect has dramatically changed at the moment probably Australia still puts a lot of money in the learning and the maintaining of a second language however the political impact has come through which language if you are I often like to use Orwell's Animal Farm as an issue for language all animals are equal but some languages and I'll translate them are more equal than others is absolutely clear cut in Australia so what you have is that a number of languages have been identified as so called priority languages now pragmatically speaking and even if we are people very much in support of all languages and all languages being equal you do understand and I think some schools in London would have that too if you look at the language background of the students you might have actually 135 languages sitting there so for that score to hold I'll come back to that so I think with a second language for all I must say what is very good about Australia is that it still has not given up on that and in fact over the last 20 years the number of students who have access to the learning of a language has phenomenally increased so in many states of Australia because the primary and secondary school system is a state based system the university system is a federal one so the difficulty is that there are a number of states in Australia so Victoria vs New South Wales vs Queensland may actually have different implementations of a national policy so the first important thing to say is that Australia does work with priority languages however initially it was made quite clear that they should not be drawn purely from what are the languages of wider teaching they should not simply be the languages that are world languages can I say that most states did take that very seriously and normally had amongst that they can sort of formulate about 10 priority languages for the state most of them had a fairly good distribution of saying about 3 or 4 so called world languages that had almost no communities Australia a typical one is French the French speaking community in Australia is minute there is one but it's fairly minute yet French was always priority language on the other hand Chinese but also Korean and in some cases Thai became one of the priority languages depending on the socio demographic make up of a particular state so some states like northern part of Australia where most Aboriginal languages languages spoken and also most Aboriginal people live actually did identify one or two Aboriginal languages that was almost not the case in Tasmania for example so I must say without being well school systems and states without being forced to do so did choose a fairly good balance between so called community languages and languages of why they learn teaching I'll come back to that so the third principle was the maintenance of Australian Indigenous languages because if they weren't going to maintain in Australia well there wasn't anywhere else to maintain them that one is a highly politicised issue that is basically subject of another paper what I'm saying here is it has to do with self self management and some of the self management has worked extremely well and others hasn't I think Australia is in a situation where it is taking self management away again from Indigenous people but actually on the advice of some of their major leaders Australia has had fairly recently a move from a very conservative government to Fadeh says so a more early right type government so things would change again but one of the major things that I must say personally and I think a lot of English are very concerned about is they had very good bilingual programmes in northern Australia so all Aboriginal children had the opportunity to learn their own language but also in which for some reason or other it was not seen as appropriate so the Aboriginal part and a much more assimilative English language programme was put in place on the basis that they put in place these two languages so I think that's on the revision the fourth principle again is still very much in place but does change over time that is you when you open a telephone directory in Australia you will find that the I'm giving that just as an example about 25 languages so there are still services in languages other than English for those migrants that are either very new or there is a higher recognition that if you migrated to Australia over the age of 40 and you have tried but you haven't managed to learn English that these services need to be there so it's the ageing part I should also say that when you know that Australia has probably the largest telephone interpreter service so the concept is phenomenal when you sit in a doctor's surgery you can actually ring up and in most cases within half an hour get someone who speaks your language the not so nice part is that the regulation of that should be there for you may very well get someone who has very little qualifications in that language but at least it's better than having your three-year-old or five-year-old doing the translation for you in a highly important situation so that's the language services aspect so let me briefly talk about the educational aspect of policy primary and secondary school because that does impact quite substantially so I've explained the notion of priority languages what Australia has seen over the last 20 years is an increasing commitment to compulsory language studies but compulsion trying to make its compulsory results it being a negative aspect so what states have is that they must provide at least three years of compulsory language learning in every child's and that's such a primary right through to secondary so it may be things have changed it may be that one state decides that everyone of seven to ten will do three years of language and that will be another one would be the typical one is two first years of high school will be language what has happened and largely voluntary is what has happened is that almost all secondary schools in Australia will have three years actually three to four years of compulsory language learning most now have also some language learning in primary school what hasn't happened yet is the two last years making it compulsory that did exist in Australia until the 1970s and it was because there was a requirement that in order to go to university you must do a language so possibly the reason for language learning at 17 and 18 weren't the right ones but it meant that in 1970 more than 60% of students ended up with A levels in a language because they aspired to go to the university now have a bit of a shock you can see what it says there approximately 13% of graduating secondary schools students take a language so there's no way you can navigate it up that much what has happened in Australia perhaps more than in Britain is what has increased is the number of languages that are available for study more than 130 languages can be studied in primary and secondary schools around Australia I'll talk about the school of languages in a minute but what is absolutely amazing I'd like to keep that in mind I'm talking about at universities you can do your A levels in more than 40 languages so you have students who can study and I'll say how but you can study 12 years of language and you can do your A levels in Turkish for example you can do your A levels in Latvia the restriction at the moment is that if 4 years in the running they have less than 5 students then the language may no longer be offered at A level now how do you overcome the issue of you cannot teach 130 languages in the same school but what Australia has developed is schools of languages so what that is every state bar one it is virtual but it is also real so what it actually is it's physically normal day schools who open up their rooms at night or on a Saturday morning and students come there to do their language component so for example there is no day school that teaches Hindi but you can do Hindi for A levels in 5 states how is it done you can go and this is a government school so you can do part of your A levels after hours or on Saturday morning by fully qualified government school teachers the only thing is we don't do it during the day that has made an enormous difference in these languages the major difficulty is that if you live in the country part of Australia 500 miles from a major capital city you can still do it but not in every language because there is not as yet the materials for pure satellite but most of Australia's population lives in four or five capital cities so actually most students don't have to travel more than four or five miles that I think has meant an enormous difference the good thing about this now I want to stress this because there is then a whole other industry often very good of ethnic schools these are the schools that are run by the ethnic communities themselves until recently their teachers had no qualifications whatsoever however in Australia now for them to operate have some qualifications and this is where I indicated in terms of settled it is the equivalent of a centre like you have set up that has provided over the last five to ten years some training so that a native speaker of a particular language can go into these schools and actually are seen to have pedagogical skills to teach a language they are not language teachers but they can teach that language in the ethnic school the main thing however is you have an entire government system completely run by the government the students pay something like 20 pounds a year and that's for materials but going to these Saturday schools does not cost any money and you can do it anywhere so that's the current situation now I should say having been here for just over two years is that when you talk to Australians they basically complain about the disaster state of languages in schools it isn't as good as it should as it could be but I think it is much better to be able to in fact choose your language can I also say there is no ethnic restriction so if you want to study Hindi but you have absolutely no background culturally or ethnically with Hindi and you will be catered for so it is this issue of it is assumed that most people of a particular background will choose that language or their parents want to choose the language but if you decide that you want to learn Farsi and you've got nothing to do with Farsi there is no restriction whatsoever so let's come now to the university situation this is the issue that we are facing in Australia and I think increasingly in Britain the big difference is I may be completely wrong but the let's say the variety of languages that you can do up to a level is much smaller than Australia so we've got 40 languages in Australia being studied by students however in 2006 it has actually come down approximately we did a survey and only 29 languages were taught in one way or another at university all these 29 only 20 actually could be done for a degree so you could do one year of Cantonese but that was all you could not do a degree in Cantonese in the mid 1990s about 66 languages were offered and so within 10 years time it has been reduced to 29 the major reason being no money too small a group let another university do it we'll get out but every university said that so we have a situation of being so multilingual having and I'll come back to that having a larger proportion of domestic students so home students not international students coming to university with a language and actually not being able to study that language top languages in Australian universities are Japanese, Chinese and in this case Mandarin French, Italian, Indonesian, German and Spanish they are very widely available in Australian universities but I can give you some figures there are 37 universities in Australia Japanese is available in 32 universities Chinese in 26 Italian in 21 Indonesian in 20 German 18 Spanish in 70 so that's about 7 languages most universities don't teach more than 6 and usually 3 of the top Asian languages and 3 of the top European languages so in each Japanese Japanese, Chinese and Indonesian you will find in most universities and you will probably find French, Spanish and either Italian or German in universities the less widely taught languages are only available in a very very small number of universities Hebrew and these languages are usually only in one university so that's the situation we get very briefly this is the population that is coming to Australia domestic students these are the top languages 18% have the speaker language more than 120 languages spoken and yet very few actually can study these languages so what we've got as a situation is drastic production one language available across country, none of the others and a workforce that is very casual so what we did after this program what we've done and this is not only language scholars but very much I must say it was deans of ours that were looking at that how can we maintain at least more than 30 languages or how can we maintain 30 languages in a situation where most first chancellors said we won't continue with the language if you don't have 120 students in first year and you don't have about 30-40 students graduating in fact more than 7 languages so we developed a project which received a lot of funding about half a million pounds just for a project to try and strengthen languages through collaborative dimensions so these were the reasons very briefly I just want to touch upon these it basically is two models and then the last I would like to talk briefly about collaborative blended model the cooperative blended exchange model is identical the blend of the online and immersion one two on the edge I'll say why they're identical the last one is one that is widely used in Australian cities and is an absolute disaster but it continues so that's the one that I did want to say a few words if I may about that one so remember the main thing is that you have situations where universities can no longer sustain the language of course they'll always teach the language but what can we do in Australia students don't move much around the country also you probably if you absolutely want to do a language and it's only taught at this university but you don't get the entry requirements that that university said you can't actually access the language because it won't let you into the university so the whole issue was how can we bring languages together the first one is a cooperative blended model and I'll just briefly read that so it goes slightly faster the main features of the model are the balance combination of an online curriculum and face-to-face on-site tutoring in other words students in all participating universities so the students stay in their own university they do not move to the other university students in all participating universities access to the same curriculum and modes of delivery their language course is made up of regular online learning and weekly local on-site classes and tutorials there is a lead university and the lead university sets the curriculum it provides the learning materials it undertakes the assessment and it hires the staff including the staff who work at the other university the lead university is usually a university with the capacity to teach the language and willing to share its curriculum with other universities who are unable to provide the necessary resources the non-lead participating universities take responsibility for the involvement of students they receive the fees of the students they provide the IT, the library and the space facilities and house the local staff now the important thing I know this is the boring part but this is why it worked is the university enters into an agreement about fee splitting usually the lead university gets 60 to 65% of the fee and agreements last between 3 and 5 years this model has proved extremely successful especially for universities wishing to drop out of a language that is still present in another language but more universities willing to introduce a new language but not having the capacity to do so so this is a model that is probably working very well for 5 to 10 years after that universities decide whether or not they continue with the language but that model has worked very well mainly because of the financial agreements also remember the students staying around universities the cooperative blended exchange model is basically the same one but in this case rather than having one lead universities you have universities exchanging languages at the moment we have so the mode of learning is the same but in fact what we currently have is one university saying we would like to introduce Arabic and another university saying well actually we would like to have Vietnamese and they exchange so in fact university X has Vietnamese but a small Vietnamese group and is interested in getting Arabic in and vice versa so in fact there is no exchange of fees here provided the numbers are basically the same again that is a model that has worked very well I can go in questions about copyright issues and so on but I want to bore you with that that one is working very well the main issue here is that if you have a very for two small languages it works very well if one wants to introduce Spanish which is a very popular language and the other one wants to do not so popular language it's not going to work because the numbers so that works very well a model that we are currently testing that is very exciting and many very small languages like it but it hasn't received that much support is actually what is called a blended online and immersion model I'll give you the example Hebrew is almost not available in Australian universities and one that has a tiny yet the demand for Hebrew in different universities is not large hundreds otherwise they will introduce them but you usually have about 10 to 15 students wanting to do Hebrew at the moment they have no opportunity to learn except by moving to that university and I explain the difficulty so that model involves an online component and two or three intensive immersion settings that is residential schools in which they practice the language we are currently testing it for high level German because German is too small in too many universities and it's working there however it really has been set up for the very small languages a model that is a variation of that is working at the moment where the immersion aspect occurs outside of Australia we are currently doing that with Indonesian because despite the fact that Indonesian is very widely available in Australia most Indonesian departments have two staff members so when one staff member goes on leave the other one which is usually they rotate which means another one has to provide all the classes for four years in Australia for four years of teaching it's impossible so what these groups have done is four or five universities with two staff members come together share their curriculum partly online but then organise an intensive residential school somewhere in Indonesia for Australia that's a fairly easy one where the students get an amount of language in six weeks as if they had it for an entire year so that's a model that works very well for the Indonesian one we haven't been able to do it for very small languages yet that's where I'd like to stop the model that I'm quite happy to talk about which is currently a disastrous one is the city based model but if you want to know more about that thank you very much