The National Centre for Performing Arts, Beijing. Photo: Trey Ratcliff
George Quinn in the Canberra Times.
Feb 27 2012
Opinion
Complacency threatens opportunities in growing Asian economies, GEORGE QUINN writes
Many people and governments in Asia believe that mastery of English is essential to economic advancement. This perception is enthusiastically fanned by the international English-teaching industry.
Most Australians are happy to float in this current of linguistic good fortune. Our business companies and universities embrace the convenience and cheapness of English as a medium for their international operations. Why bother devoting long years to the arduous study of an Asian language when our own language, English, works very nicely in Asia? But as prosperity spreads across the tiger economies of Asia a new linguistic reality is emerging. Except in small enclaves (Singapore, for example), growing prosperity is starting to by-pass command of English.
When an economy is booming ordinary people no longer need English to get rich. Prosperity acquires its own largely home-grown momentum. Local languages start to outstrip English in high-end trade and investment. This doesn’t mean that fewer people in Asia are using English. But it does mean that English speakers no longer dominate the growing ranks of prosperous entrepreneurs and consumers. Increasingly, wealth and consumer clout is with people who don’t know (and don’t much care about) English. Australia hasn’t really twigged to this yet. English-language complacency still reigns. As the role of Asian languages in Asia’s prosperity does an up-tick, our study of these languages is on a downward trajectory. Our complacency is on dramatic display when you look at the numbers of Australian students who go to Asian countries to study in Asian-language courses. Take Indonesia, for example. At any one moment no more than 50 Australians (usually fewer) are studying in Indonesia in accredited courses in an Indonesian-language environment. To crunch the numbers another way, only about one in every 400,000 Australian citizens is currently studying in Indonesia. If Indonesia was a remote never-never land this might be understandable. But it is our huge near neighbour. Economically it is expanding at warp speed with a growth rate currently around three times that of Australia’s. Australia is already making some wobbly attempts to surf this wave, but as Indonesia’s growth gathers pace and Australia’s economy becomes more closely enmeshed with it, more and more we will need to be able to communicate with Indonesians beyond their English-speaking elite. If we don’t, our linguistic tunnel vision will narrow our options and stymie our capacity to take maximum advantage of our neighbour’s transformation.
Most Asian countries, by the way, show no similar timidity in studying the indigenous languages of their Asian trading partners. Of course they study English in very large numbers too, but unlike us, they don’t stop at English. In China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, for example, there are specialist universities of foreign language studies where a range of Asian languages are popular with local students. Study abroad is popular too. About one Indonesian in 14,000 studies in Australia, compared with the 1 in 400,000 Australians studying in Indonesia. Japanese flood into China to study. During a recent visit to Hanoi I witnessed scores of Chinese students swotting hard on Vietnamese language lessons, and for them Vietnamese is just as difficult as it is for English speakers. But Australia struggles to send even one student a year to study Vietnamese in Vietnam. In our country there is still a perception – subtle but powerful – that Indonesia and other Asian nations don’t have much to teach our students. To put it crudely, the market rules. Asian students come to our shores in their hundreds of thousands because our educational goods are more saleable than theirs, and that’s why our own students prefer to stay at home too.
But just ask any of the pathetically few Australians who have actually studied in Indonesia (or India, or China, or Japan, or Thailand, or Vietnam, or Korea) about their experience. You won’t be able to shut them up. Living in the midst of Asia’s new dynamism, and interacting with it in its own linguistic terms, is a profound learning experience. It changes perceptions and changes lives. It is precisely this transformative aspect of overseas study in a foreign language that seems to frighten many of Australia’s conservative, risk-averse parents, educators and politicians. If our young people study in Indonesia, for example, perhaps they will discover some inconvenient truths.
They will discover that Indonesia’s newly prosperous middle-class is at least as big as the population of Australia, and many times bigger than Singapore’s. They may even discover some subversive facts, that our government’s travel advisories for Indonesia are a paranoid cataract in the eyes of Australia’s politicians, and (shock horror) Indonesian Islam is not the narrow-minded, oppressive, terror-ridden bogeyman it is so widely represented to be in our country. English is a wonderful aid to global communication, but it can also be a comfortable doona that cocoons us from key features of a wider world that are important to our future security and prosperity. In Australia the doona role of English is currently dominant. We need policy initiatives that encourage our students to peek out. Study abroad in an Asian language should be the well-funded norm, and not the problematic preserve of a very few who currently get little more than geek status for their courage and foresight.
George Quinn is an Adjunct Professor in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University.
To see the Canberra Times article please this link.
Please see this link for Prof Quinn’s article recently published in the Jakarta Post.
February 28th, 2012 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments Off
