Multilingualism and assimilationism in Australia's literacy-related educational policies

Abstract

Australia is a country of high linguistic diversity, with more than 300 languages spoken. Today, 19% of the population aged over 5 years speak a language other than English at home. Against this background, we examine government policies and prominent initiatives developed at national level in the past 30 years to address the challenge of offering ‘Literacy for all’, in particular focusing on minority language speaking children. Across the examined policies and initiatives, a distinct negative correlation can be observed: the more multilingual Australia has become, the more assimilationist the policies, and the more monolingual the orientation of the society that governments have sought to establish through policy. We argue that to enhance literacy outcomes more generally, this orientation needs to be reversed. We explain why policy understanding and approach need to instead promote the maintenance of home languages and support literacy acquisition in these languages.

Keywords:

• Australia
• bilingualism
• diversity
• literacy policies
• minority language
• multiculturalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For instance, schools make literacy their ‘learning focus’; cf. ‘This year we will again make Reading and Writing the improvement agenda for the school’ (Newsletter, Robertson State School, Brisbane, Queensland; 30 January 2014).

2. Australian Year (class) levels correspond roughly to those in the USA, i.e. Year 1 corresponds to Grade 1 in the USA (children aged 6–7 years), Year 4 corresponds to Grade 4 in the USA (children aged 9–10 years).

3. In the ALLS, proficiency was measured on a scale ranging from 0 to 500 points. The resulting continuous scores were grouped into five skill levels, with Level 1 being the lowest measured level of literacy. For a more detailed description of the levels, see SCOTESE (2012, pp. 26–28).

4. Those who speak a language other than English at home include 53% of first-generation Australians, 20% of second-generation Australians and only 1.6% of the third-plus generation (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2012a). These declining percentages provide evidence of a language shift away from first languages towards English only, which constitutes a loss of opportunities for the country (Eisenchlas et al., 2013).

5. Brock (2001: 58) observed of the funding for the NPL and the ALLP policy that superseded it (Section 2.2): ‘Although doubt is expressed in the report about the accuracy of the [NPL] figures, outlays for the years had been as follows: 1987–88 – $15 million; 1988–89 – $28.65 million; 1988–89 [sic!] – $27.3 million; 1990–91 – $23 million (AACLAME, 1990, p. 2). […] In striking contrast, the magnitude of difference in scope between the NPL and ALLP can be illustrated by the four year figures of the latter’s implementation: 1991–92 – $278.46 million; 1992–93 – $350.51 million; 1993–94 – $333.33 million’. According to these figures, the NLP (with $93.95 million) received only about 10% of what the ALLP received (with $932.3 million) over a comparable time frame (this, however, does not take inflation into account and does not trace from where the funding was sourced).

6. Further national statements and policies on languages were devised, such as the ‘National Statement and Plan for Languages Education in Australian Schools 2005–2008’ (MCEETYA, 2005) and the ‘Australia in the Asian Century – White Paper’ (Commonwealth of Australia, 2012).

7. The then Minister for Education who had initiated the inquiry into ‘Teaching reading’ (Dr Brendan Nelson) recently observed that ‘anybody with more than a passing interest in teaching reading would regret that governments on both sides of politics had failed to implement the Rowe report’ (Ferrari, 2012).

8. In addition to the ‘reward payments’ to states and territories as laid out in COAG (2008), a current state-based example of this is Queensland’s Great Results Guarantee (QDETE, 2014), which requires all state schools to enter into an agreement (the ‘Guarantee’) under which schools will be accountable for improving student performance. Student performance is of course assessed based on achieved NAPLAN results.

9. The data are still not appropriately disaggregated (ACTA, 2013) and thus the test cannot inform on minority language speaking children’s performance, notwithstanding the Senate report’s majority recommendation ‘that ACARA analyse and report publicly on how NAPLAN tests are serving different groups of Language Background Other Than English (LBOTE) students’ (SRCEEWR, 2010, p. xi), which has apparently not been implemented properly.

10. Chiro (2014) notes a similar retreat from multicultural policies in a number of Western democracies.

11. A recent clear expression of this view is the speech by the now Australian Minister for Social Services, Scott Morrison, at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies in London in January 2013. There, he argued for a ‘post multiculturalism agenda’ and recognition of the ‘supremacy of Australian values, [and] the primacy of the English language’ (Morrison, 2013). This thesis has also been put forward by studies in areas apart from literacy, such as, for instance, Hage (1998) and Martín (2008). Although in this paper we concentrate on the languages of migrants and refugees, further evidence comes from the treatment of Australia’s First Peoples. One obvious example is the government withdrawal of the bilingual programmes in the Northern Territory in 2008, with all its ramifications (cf. Devlin, 2009; Dickson, 2012a, 2012b; Murphy, 2012). As this is a complex and problematic issue in itself, we do not take it up in this paper.

12. We ourselves are working on a pilot study that investigates whether children can self-direct their literacy development in their minority language by playing online games in that language, thus bypassing some of the challenges posed by the wide range of languages spoken in Australia (Eisenchlas, Schalley, & Moyes, in press).