Aussie gov't encourages children to learn Asian language to boost nation's future competitiveness

The Australian government is expanding access to an early-learning language app that's teaching preschoolers a foreign language, including Chinese, to boost the nation's future capability to take advantage of the growing economic opportunities in Asia.

Australian business leaders have consistently argued the nation's foreign language capability has been lagging as the transition from compulsory language study in junior years until senior and tertiary education has been falling.

The proportion of grade-12 students studying a foreign language in Australia has dropped from 40 percent in the 1960s to 12 percent in the present school year, according to Asia Education Foundation.

"Initiatives like this languages app will be vital to helping our children take advantage of the Asian Century and the new opportunities our economic transition presents," Australian Education Minister Simon Birmingham said in a statement on Thursday.

Birmingham, who will be announcing the apps expansion to 10,000 children at 300 early learning centers at a conference in Sydney on Thursday, said an evaluation 42 trial centers showed 78 percent of parents had seen their children using foreign language outside of pre-school. One-third of the centers will be teaching Chinese, while others will focus on other key regional languages including Indonesian, Japanese and Arabic.

"This languages program ticks the boxes for an excellent educational resource: it's backed by evidence, it inspires students, it gets parents involved in education," Birmingham said.

"The app is (also) driving an active interest amongst children in the culture of the language they're learning."

Though a great initiative, Australia has "a long way to go" in terms of its Chinese language learning, James Laurenceson, deputy director of the Australia-China Relations Institute told Xinhua.

Recent research commissioned by the Australia-China Relations Institute has found in later years of learning, students from a non-Chinese background are dropping out of language classes on fear they can't compete against those from a Chinese cultural heritage.

"Our economic future is tied up in the region and China is the biggest player. Clearly we need people who can converse in Mandarin if we're going to tap those opportunities and achieve our potential in the region," Laurenceson said.

"(The initiative) is a good start, but if combined with other measures, (Chinese language study) can greatly improve."

Other language initiatives the Australian government has implemented include the New Colombo Plan which supports Australian undergraduate students to undertake in-country study and internships throughout the Indo-Pacific. Endit