Key principle five
Build an adequate supply of world-class Asian language teachers and resources.
Participating schools, colleges and universities must be required to appoint adequate numbers of full-time, permanent language teachers, and to support them with adequate resources and infrastructure. A proportion of the funding they receive will be quarantined for this.
The number of quality language teachers qualified to teach at primary, secondary and tertiary levels needs to be built quickly.
More Australians need to be attracted to the vocation of language teaching. Scholarships and other incentives need to be targeted towards increasing the number of people undertaking tertiary degrees in language teaching. This includes providing incentives and opportunities to practicing teachers of other subjects to enable them to re-train as languages teachers.
Language teacher training should ensure that language studies are taken concurrently with teacher education studies, and that language teaching methodology units are language specific. Tertiary training needs to incorporate a unit or units of study based on a period of in-country experience, as a compulsory component of the languages teaching qualification – and funding and other incentives should be tied to this.
Tagged funding should be made available to colleges and universities to make places available for selected native speakers of a language who are not yet undertaking a full teaching degree to study language teaching methodology.
Language teachers need to be encouraged to structure their whole career around the teaching of language. Performance-based remuneration should be considered, as should regular sabbatical periods for further study, including in-country study. Language teachers should have the opportunity to undertake ongoing professional development in the teaching of their target language.
Language teachers will be supported by a centralized on-line language teaching resource bank administered by the National Asian languages Institute, from which they can draw teaching materials, to which they can contribute ideas and successful course ideas and materials, and through which they can establish and maintain contact with the community of language teachers across Australia.
Teachers need ready access to the English-language literature about the language and culture they are teaching. Using the rich English-language resources available on the societies, politics, culture, and arts of Asian countries helps reinforce the teaching of language, through quickly building students’ knowledge and understanding of the cultural realm they are entering.
Teaching languages well requires dedicated spaces and specialist equipment. Schools participating in the National Asian Languages Program should be required to allocate specialist language teaching rooms and equipment to the target languages and their cultural products (movies, television, music, internet). Part of their funding should be tied to the provision of specialist teaching space and equipment.
Targeted funding should be directed towards supporting research in languages teaching, particularly favouring research projects with practical applications in improving the quality of language teaching.