The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
The Forum - On Line Opinion's article discussion area



Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Main Articles General

Sign In      Register

The Forum > Article Comments > Speaking the language > Comments

Speaking the language : Comments

By Mercurius Goldstein, published 23/10/2006

Why doesn’t Australia hire more language teachers from overseas?

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. Page 3
  5. 4
  6. All
Part 2

Importing foreign language teachers from Japan whose record of teaching English is just better than South Korea’s: both countries spend inordinate amounts of money bringing in unqualified young English “teachers” to waste huge amounts of time with pathetic, disappointing results for the majority. Please deny this and enlighten me. Articles I have read and people I speak with do not tout Japan as as the paragon of superbly effective foreign language teaching.

I support the idea of tandem teaching done by local teachers who know the students and their backgrounds and needs (as far as that is possible) and native speaker guest teachers with really good training. Think you’re likely to get funding for such a scheme in Australia, though?

Sorry, Mercurius. Good luck with that but … this mob in Canberra are the problem (a narrow view of languages teaching which goes: learn the language in mechanistic fashion, get a job in international business, rip people off.) No solution can ever come from them. You are right: we have to wait for Rudd & co.

(POSTSCRIPT Sample of values confusion in public media / discourse: “Buy this, get fat, now go to the gym, this house could be yours, you want this car, you do, don’t you want to be just like her, I’ll never never never introduce a GST, we’ll decide who comes into this country, naughty North Korea, by the way we’re going nuclear ourselves, oh, er, yes, climate change seems to be real after all, um, vote for me, I’ll save you from terror,” etc.)

Now, these issues would make excellent discussion topics for real foreign language classes
Posted by Tillet, Tuesday, 24 October 2006 10:17:43 AM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Poor old Tillet, so ingrained with left wing ideology that he completely misses the reality of the real world.

Those who want subjects like maths and science to have a nationwide core syllabus don't want to control everything students in Australian schools are taught. But they do want the teaching based around the knowledge, skills and understandings of a prescribed CORE within the syllabus. That might make up 60% or so of the whole curriculum with the rest being decided locally. But we need that CORE to ensure that our young people are properly prepared for ongoing study. Neglecting formal development of maths and science in Australian schools means that these disciplines will be dominated by mathematicians and scientists from other countries like Singapore and Japan where these subjects are not dumbed down by the excesses of Outcomes Based Education. In other words we must ensure that we do not waste our homegrown talents.

I'd suggest that you inject a bit of common sense into your argument, rather than base it on your hate of the present Federal Government.
Posted by Sniggid, Tuesday, 24 October 2006 11:52:28 AM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
According to Tillet poor old Mercurius is some sort of looney toon right winger who is friendly with Genghis Khan and I spend my time ranking pigs. It must be nice for him to be so sure that he is so right and everbody else is part of a great conspiracy.

I have had my arguments with Mercurius, but in this article he puts forward the suggestion that we would do well to look abroad in case we found an answer, or even a part of the answer to a problem we have in education today. I agree with that suggestion even though I have doubts on the particular case he examined. I tried to build on that sensible idea by pointing out that trying to get ideas from abroad is a valid move for more than just Japanese teachers. In particular I referred to maths/science because that happens to be my area of expertise, such as it is.

It is surely astonishingly arrogant to imagine that we can learn nothing from anybody else.

Tillets behaviour and thinking surprised me and made me think of a description of the exiled Trotsky:

A skin of malice.

Sad.
Posted by eyejaw, Tuesday, 24 October 2006 8:12:31 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
All the comments so far seem to miss the point

WHY DON'T SCHOOLS TEACH ESPERANTO TO YOUNG STUDENTS?

It is a fun language, easy to learn, no problems with spelling or pronunciation - think of the words which contain "ough" - bow, coff, doe, ort, ruff, etc; one sound/one letter (think of CaKe and biCyCle); no peculiar verb changes: am/is/are/were/been; basic root words on to which prefixes and suffixes can be added; no problems with technology - i.e., 'muso' means 'mouse', either the wee beastie or the little guide for a commputer. And with one of the aforementioned suffixes, we have 'musumi' for which there is no single English language equivalent - it means 'use the mouse to .....'; pronunciation is always the same - stress on penultimate syllable.

Penfriendships can begin when (young) students have mastered the first few chapters and as their letters cross the world, their knowledge of the language increases, until the time comes when they feel confident enough to meet their correspondents.

Famous books have been translated - the Bible, the Noble Koran (useful means of understanding our immigrants), Shakespeare, Tolkein, Christie, etc. Also original writing, including some very clever plays on words. There is a limerick about a woman from the twin city Buda-Pest who is, so they said, "by day in Buda quite NUDA and by night in Pest'a SENVESTA" I don't think I need to translate the words in capital letters.

There are daily broadcasts from Beijing, Havana, the Vatican, and Melbourne radio

Charlie Chaplin used Esperanto in The Great Dictator; it was also used to denote an unnamed country in the Clark Gable film Fool's Paradise

Some of the best Esperanto speakers I have met came from Korea and Japan, where it is the lingua franca for a philosoply called Oomoto

For older students, Esperanto will be introduced into the Modern Languages section of the University of NSW at Kensington
Posted by tregenna, Tuesday, 24 October 2006 10:35:16 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Thanks to all the teachers who have commented and to Tillet & eyejaw for an amusing side-debate. It is gratifying (and rare) to encounter a fair-minded critic such as eyejaw who won't reflexively rubbish a person's entire argument just because they disagree on other matters.

This is not the first time someone to the left of me (they do exist) has suggested I may be a right-wing loon. I've also been labled elsewhere as a left-wing multicultural traitor. Sometimes such labels have been applied to me in response to the same article. Tillet, if you read my other articles, you'll see first-hand the rhetorical demise of those who've tried to pigeonhole me in the past.

As I tried to make clear in the article, there is no way that a wholesale transplant of the Japanese model of foreign-language teaching would work here - the cultural and educational landscapes are too different. But short of large-scale domestic recruitment and retraining of teachers, what are we going to do? The unprecedented demand for language learning is a nice problem to have, but these staff shortages aren't going away just because it's more comfortable for us to protect our domestic language teaching jobs.

Meanwhile, Tillet, since you asked, my reason for supporting languages teaching is that if our children don't learn to speak to each other, their governments will do the talking for them. Australia, Japan and Germany were mortal enemies 60+ years ago; today they learn each other's languages in vast numbers. Perhaps we need a revival of Arabic & Persian?

And what's wrong with advocating and emphasising the multivarious range of benefits that result from language learning, be they cultural, economic or otherwise?

On our own time, with our own money, we may be fortunate enough to have the luxury of learning for its own sake. But if we're using public resources, we need to justify to the public the full range of benefits. You can call that utili-whatsit if you like. I call it the ethical use of public money.
Posted by Mercurius, Wednesday, 25 October 2006 7:32:17 AM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
AS one who has learnt and used several other languages and is in business importing from non English spaeking countries may I make a few points.

It is important that the teacher has a knowledge of teaching and a fluency in the language studied. The teacher should be able to speak the language so well that they would taken to be a native speaker. Otherwise they can badly mislead by incorrect pronunciation and use of words. A good knowledge of English is utterly unnecessary. I had an excellent Spanish teacher whose English was hard to understand but was from Seville. Now she is back in Spain, no doubt (I shudder at the thought) teaching Spanglish.

English is not the only language of business and probably never will be. At an artificial level many speak English, at the expensive hotel or restaurant but try to get an explanation of someting complex and that is another thing. I import from Spain and would be lost without some Spanish. The technical department just aren't good at languages. And to use their language is taken as a compliment.

In sales a knowledge of the local language is just politeness.
Posted by logic, Thursday, 26 October 2006 9:04:57 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. Page 3
  5. 4
  6. All

About Us :: Search :: Discuss :: Feedback :: Legals :: Privacy