Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 35, Issue 3, 2012

In school languages education in Australia at present there is an increasing diversity of languages and learners learning particular languages that results from a greater global movement of students. This diversity builds on a long-established profile of diversity that reflects the migration history of Australia. It stands in sharp contrast to the force of standardisation in education in general and in the history of the development of state and national frameworks for the learning of languages K-12 in Australia and indeed beyond. These frameworks have characteristically generalised across diverse languages, diverse learner groups and diverse program conditions, in particular, the amount of time made available for language learning. In addition, in the absence of empirical studies of learner achievements in learning particular languages over time, the development of such frameworks has drawn primarily on internationally available language proficiency descriptions [such as the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), the International Second Language Proficiency Rating Scale (ISLPR), and more recently the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR)] that were developed primarily to serve reporting and credentialing rather than learning purposes.

Drawing on a description of the current context of linguistic and cultural diversity and on a brief characterisation of the history of curriculum and assessment framework development for the languages area, I provide a rationale for acknowledging in the development and use of frameworks (i.e. descriptions of achievements) the diversity of languages that comprise the languages learning area in Australia and, in particular, the diverse learner groups who come to their learning with diverse experiences of learning and using particular languages. The Student Achievement in Asian Languages Education (SAALE) study provides an example of the development of descriptions of achievement that are sensitive to these dimensions of context. I discuss the rationale for such context-sensitive descriptions in relation to their potential purposes and uses at the language policy and planning and educational systems level, at the teaching and learning level, and in ongoing research.

While there have been a number of studies exploring the impact of time-on-task and language background on language achievement for both English and other languages, the Student Achievement in Asian Languages Education (SAALE) project constitutes the first systematic attempt to gather empirical evidence of these effects for four Asian languages (Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese and Korean) in Australian schools. The paper focuses on the approach adopted to measure and exemplify the diverse nature of learner achievements in the context of concern. This approach involved a) the gathering of information about the language background and prior learning experience of the study’s participants in order to establish learner sub-groups for subsequent analysis, b) the use of common assessment procedures at each level of schooling to compare levels of achievement across learner sub-groups and c) the analysis of samples of each sub-group’s performance by teams of teacher experts to develop rich descriptions of achievement reflecting the different dimensions of diversity relevant to each language.

The paper outlines the methodology adopted for the study, and reports briefly on the overall findings, Particular attention is paid to the challenges encountered in undertaking the research and to the further efforts that are needed to build on the project outcomes.

In the Australian education context, there are typically two cohorts of language learners at the secondary school level, those who commence their study of the target language early in their primary schooling (early starters), and those who commence their study later, at the beginning of secondary school (late starters). The two groups may have undertaken their language study under quite different program conditions, in particular in relation to “time-on-task”i. There is little empirical evidence about the nature of student achievement in languages at the end of primary and in junior secondary and its relationship to time-on-task. This paper compares the achievements of a sample of early and late start students of Indonesian in Australia using score data gathered from common measures of achievement. In addition, a small sample of student written responses are analysed in order to highlight issues related to eliciting and describing student achievement that may not be evident from the quantitative data alone. The findings of the study reveal the nature of achievement by early and late starters of Indonesian in the SAALE study, as well as the complexity of investigating a single variable such as time-on-task in relation to student achievement. The paper concludes by recommending that assessment of student achievement in language learning take into consideration methodologies that may capture more holistically a constellation of variables that impact on students’ language learning.

The present study investigates to what extent learners’ first language (L1) may have an impact on their writing and speaking performances. While Japanese continues to enjoy a large enrolment across levels in Australian schools and universities, the population of learners has become increasingly diverse creating challenges for teachers. One dimension of this diversity is first language background which is the focus of the present study. The data for the present study includes writing and speaking test task performances from learners of different L1s collected for a larger study (see Scarino et al., 2011, and other papers in this volume). The samples were first scored using the scale developed for the larger study and then further analysed qualitatively. The results show that students from Chinese and Korean language backgrounds received higher scores in both writing and speaking, and showed a richness of content and a variety of forms and structures not evident in the performance of those from English and other L1 backgrounds. These findings are discussed in light of learners’ level of familiarity with aspects of Japanese culture. The paper presents some suggestions for pedagogy, assessment and further research based on the findings.

While Chinese language learning in Australian schools is characterised by predominantly second language programs for learners who have had no prior exposure to the target language, there is increasing participation by Australian-born children who speak Putonghua (Mandarin) or another dialect at home. Curriculum and assessment frameworks and syllabuses at senior secondary level have responded to the diversity in learner background through the provision of separate curricula and assessment schemes for different learner groups based on country of birth, prior educational experience and languages used at home. However the impact of learner background on learning and achievement as learners progress through Chinese language programs both in primary and secondary school remains under-researched. In particular, evidence of how the performance of second language learners differs from that of learners who a) speak the language at home and b) may have substantial community schooling experience beyond the school classroom, or c) were born and initially educated in Chinese, is very limited.

This paper reports on the results of the Student Achievement in Asian Languages Education (SAALE) Project (Scarino et al., 2011; Scarino, this issue and Elder, Kim & Knoch, this issue) with regard to student achievement in Chinese. It focuses on the writing performance of Year 10 learners of Chinese and considers specifically the impact of language background by comparing performances between Australian-born students who do and do not speak Chinese at home. Scores assigned to students’ writing gathered on common test procedures confirms the expectation that background language learners perform at significantly higher levels and suggests that the two groups also differ in the nature of that performance. The implications of this data for the teaching, learning and assessment of Chinese in schools, and for the appropriate provision of programs for these different groups of learners is discussed.

This paper explores how learner background shapes learner performance on discourse features in writing by analysing data produced as part of the Student Achievement in Asian Languages Education project (Scarino et al., 2011) by Year 10 (mid-secondary school) students learning Korean as a foreign or heritage language. Five participants were in their second year of learning Korean as a foreign language at an Australian high school, whereas four Korean-speaking participants were learning their mother tongue in Saturday community schools and had varied experience of learning Korean and English, the language of mainstream schooling in Australia. Participants’ performance on two writing tasks–one independent and one integrated– is examined in terms of two assessment categories–“forms and structures” (i.e., morpho-syntax) and “discourse” (i.e., coherence and cohesion). Results reveal that participants’ performance within each group varies according to task types and that the pattern of within-group variation also differs between the two groups. It appears that the two types of learners respond differently to different types of tasks and that their learning is different in nature. It is concluded that this difference needs to be taken into consideration in teaching and assessment in languages education at the secondary school level.