Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Teaching Young Second Language Learners In Lote Contexts, Honglin Chen, Janica Nordstrom

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

The study of languages has long been considered to have important social, cognitive and economic benefits for individuals and the nation. In Australia, however, despite its growing strength in linguistic resources and the various Government initiatives, there has been a disturbing decline in languages study by school-aged children in Australia. For example, in the 1940s and 50s, over 40 percent of students graduated with a language (Teese & Polesol, 2003) which had declined to only 12 percent in 2012. In primary schools, aggregated cross-sectoral data from government, private and catholic systems in Sydney and Wollongong indicate that 30-40 percent of …