Education Commons^™

Second Languages And Australian Schooling, Joseph Lo Bianco

Australian Education Review

It is an underlying principle of AER 54 that active efforts should be made to cultivate the latent bilingual potential within Australia’s wider population and that this should be linked to major improvements in the quality of language teaching in schools. A combined approach of this kind will require investment in specialised preparation for language teachers, more time allocated to second language teaching in schools, and coordination of effort across school and post-schooling sectors. Section 1 describes the critical distinction between niche learning and mass learning of languages, and the current distribution of language competence throughout Australian society. The role …