As Australia’s international trade portfolio continues to soar, UQ language expert Alfredo Martinez-Exposito believes the nation’s multilingual capabilities need to improve if its regional and global engagement is to grow.
Associate Professor Martinez-Exposito, Head of the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies and Reader in Spanish, said UQ had experienced a growing student interest in foreign languages, which not only benefited individual career prospects but the future of Australia’s economy.
He said Chinese was performing above all expectations at UQ while Russian was making a strong comeback, with a 55 percent increase in enrolments since 2007.
“The Queensland Government and UQ established in 2007 a joint scholarship to foster the study of the Russian language with excellent results,” he said.
Associate Professor Martinez-Exposito said Australia had failed to seriously invest in foreign languages for more than a decade and the country’s teaching and learning cycle had profoundly deteriorated, including the quality of teacher training programs, basic research funding mechanisms, academic relevance, international exchange programs, infrastructure and social visibility.
“Queensland has a lot of catch up to do – teaching structures need to be changed if we are to lift our educational standards to meet the minimum international quality benchmarks,” he said.
“Monolingualism will be increasingly less tolerated by the economy – and our international universities now realise that proficiency in more than one world language is one of the keys to a successful regional and global engagement.”
Associate Professor Martinez-Exposito said university language programs spent a large proportion of their resources in introductory and elementary language teaching, which inhibited a student’s capabilities for postgraduate study.
“Students who start studying a language at this late stage have less time to acquire the proficiency level required to do any serious postgraduate study by the time they complete their bachelor degree,” he said.
“Pressure on the tertiary sector to provide introductory language teaching makes it difficult for language departments to focus on the technical and expert levels they should be engaging with, for example, training of translators and interpreters, advanced cultural studies and applied linguistics.”
Associate Professor Martinez-Exposito said UQ’s new LOTE (Language Other Than English) bonus scheme, where school-leavers will improve their entry rank by successfully studying year 12 advanced maths and/or language other than English, sent a strong message to students that adopting a second language will equip them with an essential skill for life.
In addition to Russian, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and French, the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies at UQ offers programs in German, Indonesian and Korean.
The University of Queensland also recently received the award for the Enhancement of Student Learning for flexible learning, for Master of Arts in Japanese Interpreting and Translation’s (MAJIT) remote translation classes.
UQ’s teachers in legal and medical translation courses are positioned interstate, with the medical instructors based in Perth and the legal translation team in Melbourne, Tokyo and California.
The MAJIT project has been nominated as the University’s entry in the flexible learning category of this year’s Carrick Awards for Australian University Teaching.
Media: Alfredo Martinez-Exposito (07 3365 6336 or a.martinez@uq.edu.au) or Eliza Plant at UQ Communications (07 3365 2619)
