Page 44 - Languages Victoria December 2019

Languages Victoria
Figure 1 - below: Enrolments in Languages in Victorian government primary and secondary schools, including the Victorian School of Languages 1996 – 2018 (DET, 2019, p. 16)
Overall in 2018, the languages with the most enrolments were Chinese (Mandarin) (18.8% of students), Italian (18.1%), Japanese (17.8%), Indonesian (15.1%), French (11.1%), Auslan (4.7%), German (4.3%), Spanish (4.3%), Vietnamese (0.8%), Greek (0.5%) (Table 1). Table 1 also provides an overview of the number of schools offering each language (note that some schools offer more than one language). There is not a direct correlation between the number of schools
Language
No. of student
%
No. of schools
Chinese
82,043
18.8
261
Italian
78,783
18.1
246
Japanese
77,781
17.8
277
Indonesian
66,071
15.1
285
French
49,131
11.1
157
Auslan
20,664
4.7
90
German
19,400
4.3
81
Spanish
19,138
4.3
52
Vietnamese
3,297
0.8
10
Greek
2,200
0.5
11
Other languages
17,005
4.5
48
Total
435,513
100
1,518
offering a language and the number of students studying a language. There are a number of possible reasons for this, including some languages having higher enrolments at the primary level, whilst others are more popular at the secondary level, or some languages are taught more frequently in smaller schools in non- metropolitan locations.
Table 1 - right: Ten most studied languages by student and school numbers, 2018. (DET, 2019, p. 8-10, 12)
(Mandarin)
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Volume 23 Number 2