MELBOURNE, July 7 (Xinhua) -- One in 10 Australian students are learning a second language in their final year of secondary school, data released on Friday revealed.
The data, released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) after the 2016 national census, found that 10 percent of students were learning another language in their final year of school, including native speakers.
The low rate of second language learning comes despite 28 percent of Australians reporting they speak more than one language at home, up from 22 percent in 2011.
Tim Mayfield, the Executive Director of the Asia Education Foundation at the University of Melbourne, said that the rate of language learning had been dropping for 50 years.
"As best as we can assess there's been a steady decline across the board from the 1960s when we had 40 percent of secondary students graduating having learned a second language," Mayfield told Xinhua on Friday.
He said that a lack of collaboration between Australia's states, territories and federal government was mainly responsible for the downturn.
Many Australian students were forced to give up on the language they had been taught at primary school when moving to secondary school due to every school having a different language program, Mayfield said.
The ABS data revealed that for the first time Asia was providing Australia with more immigrants than Europe with 20 percent coming from China or India alone.
Mayfield said that in order to embrace its status as an Asian nation, and harness the economic opportunities presented by trade with China, Australia needed to improve its rate of second language learning.
"If we can't get language right then the question has to be around how deep Australia's commitment is to taking advantage of the economic opportunities," he said.
"I think it's a national failure, I think it's failure of imagination."
He said that reversing the trend that sees a lot of native English-speaking teachers flock to Asia to teach English as a second language could go a long way to solving the problem.
"I think that is a key piece of the puzzle. We know that a lack of quality teaching is one of the reasons we're not doing second language learning well," Mayfield said.
"What we can look at short-term is creating pathways whether it be in-person or using technology to get teachers from Asia into Australia.
"The great aspiration would be to have languages treated with equal seriousness and intent in our curriculum as other learning areas such as maths, science and English."
"A great start would be to get some uniformity and collaboration between the states and territories and the commonwealth."
