Ethnic Communities' Council of Victoria

MEDIA RELEASE
April 30, 2009

CONCERN CUTBACKS TO UNIVERSITY FOREIGN LANGUAGE COURSES REFLECT A BROADER TREND

Mr Sam Afra, Chairperson of the Ethnic Communities’ Council of Victoria (ECCV) expressed concern today that extensive cutbacks to Victoria University’s foreign language program reflected a broader decline in the opportunity to study languages other than English (LOTE) in Victorian tertiary institutions.

“The announcement that Victoria University students will no longer be able to study Japanese, Chinese or Spanish on campus is deeply disappointing and already a source of alarm to current and prospective students,” Mr Afra said.

On Tuesday it was confirmed that from 2010 only one LOTE course will be on offer at Victoria University – Vietnamese, with arrangements made for Victoria University students of Chinese, Japanese or Spanish to continue their language studies at the University of Melbourne.“While I appreciate that many tertiary institutions are struggling with increased competition for a shrinking pool of available finances, too often it is Humanities courses such as foreign languages and cross-cultural studies that suffer first and suffer hardest,” Mr Afra said

Mr Afra noted that Mandarin and Japanese were among the target languages identified by the Australian Government’s own National Asian Languages and Studies in Schools Program (NALSSP).

“As recently as December last year, the NALSSP was setting a 2020 timeline for one in eight Australian students exiting Year 12 with sufficient fluency in one of these languages to engage in trade and commerce in Asia and/or pursue further university study.”

“The obvious question arising from the cutbacks at Victoria University is: where will this expectant surge in bilingual Year 12 students go ?”Mr Afra also expressed concern that shuttling Victoria University LOTE students across to the University of Melbourne was not a viable option in the long term.

“I understand that at the moment, second and third year Spanish students at the University of Melbourne already have to transfer across to La Trobe University’s Bundoora Campus to complete their studies,” Mr Afra explained.

“So that means from 2010, a Victoria University student wishing to complete an Honours degree in Spanish can expect to hopscotch between three different Universities around Melbourne. Clearly, this is not the most conducive system for living or learning. Nor is it in keeping with the hard-earned image of Victoria as a prime destination for international activity and home to cultural diversity.”

Mr Afra said that if Universities needed to explore ways of pooling resources to deliver LOTE courses, then greater effort was needed to ensure the availability of an adequate number and variety of LOTE spaces to meet demand without causing undue inconvenience to students.