Multilingual boost

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Tags: languages, partnerships, winter-2009

An Australian-first alliance between Queensland’s three largest universities will expand higher learning in a range of Asian and European languages.

Three Queensland universities have pooled together their language teaching programs

With $2.27 million in Australian Government funding, The University of Queensland, Griffith University and Queensland University of Technology will pool teaching of at least nine languages so their students can learn them as part of formal studies.

Students at all three institutions will be able to major in Chinese, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish. Provided they study at award level at one of the three universities, they will be credited as if they were studying at their own institutions.

The alliance is the first of its kind involving multiple languages and three Australian universities. It arises from a determination by the three vice-chancellors that major world languages must continue to be offered at university level in Brisbane, even though enrolments are in single digits at some institutions.

“If we applied accounting principles alone some of these languages would disappear from university curricula,” UQ Vice-Chancellor Professor Paul Greenfield said.
“However the three universities’ bottom line is that we can’t afford to see language scholarship atrophy in Australia’s third biggest capital city.”

“This alliance is the most comprehensive educational collaboration ever undertaken among our universities,” QUT Vice-Chancellor Professor Peter Coaldrake said.
“Together we can provide a more sustainable and wide-ranging offering of languages to our students than is possible as individual universities.”

Griffith University Vice-Chancellor Professor Ian O’Connor said the initiative would build on the university’s existing strengths in Asian and European languages.

“This is a tangible move to cater for any student who wants to develop their passion for languages by providing access and opportunity to study where it suits them,” he said.

The alliance builds on recent initiatives by the universities to boost interest in language education, starting at the high school level. All three have offered bonus points to school leavers applying for university who have succeeded in a language other than English in year 12.

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