FIELDING, Associate Professor Ruth, Private capacity [by video link] HARBON, Professor Lesley, Private capacity [by video link] KOHLER, Dr Michelle, Private capacity [by video link] [12:31] CHAIR: Welcome. Do you have any additional comments on the capacity in which you are appearing? Prof. Fielding : I am an associate professor at Monash University but appearing as an individual based upon my prior research. Prof. Harbon : I'm a professor of international studies and education at University of Technology Sydney, and I'm appearing as an individual working from my research base. Dr Kohler : I'm currently the Principal of the School of Languages in the Department for Education, South Australia, and also an adjunct research fellow at the University of Adelaide, but I'm appearing as an individual today. CHAIR: Thank you, all. This hearing is a legal proceeding of the parliament and it has the same standing as proceedings of the House. The giving of false or misleading evidence is a serious matter and may be regarded as a contempt of parliament. The evidence given today will be recorded by Hansard and attracts parliamentary privilege. Do you wish to make a brief opening statement before we proceed to discussion? Prof. Fielding : I'm happy to wait for questions. Prof. Harbon : Yes, I do. Dr Kohler : I'd like to as well. CHAIR: Okay. Lesley and then Michelle will make opening statements, and then we'll proceed to the discussion. Prof. Harbon : It's my firm belief that Australia can and should further commit to building Asia capability through the education system and beyond. I make these reflections from a set of my own educational experiences in Australia as a student and as a teacher during a period of over 50 years. I learned Indonesian in high school and at university and graduated as a secondary schoolteacher of Indonesian. I participated in an in-country summer Indonesian language school one summer as part of that degree. I've taught at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels in the NT and Queensland and in language teacher education in Tasmania and New South Wales. My perceptions about the positive benefits of Australians building an Asian literacy and capability come from the essence of what appeared in my own personal and professional story and concrete experiences in learning. Learning in the early years of schooling and in in-country experiences, as well as ensuring accomplished teaching and teacher preparation, is all part of the scene for me. I've been involved in good-practice models in this area. Ruth and I have looked over a period of more than 10 years at a bilingual model of education in Australia, and we've seen that this has kicked off an Asia capability in the four primary schools that we followed for over 10 years. Preparing teachers to teach their content in an Asian language is also possible in teacher preparation. Teacher education is where that major solution could be realised. Incentives for preservice teachers to use their existing competencies in an Asian language and to train with bilingual teaching methods to implement the school curriculum would ensure teacher educators are ready for this challenge, and it needs to be incremental. Finally, there's the value of an in-country experience. In a recent piece of research, I asked some Australian and Indonesian teachers about the 25 years that had passed since their in-country experience—I took Australians to Indonesia and Indonesians to Australia 25 years ago—and about their reflections on the value of that experience, on how teaching careers have evolved. They noted things, importantly, like intensive language learning, the chance to become more internationalised, a chance to prepare for their career development and a chance to learn. But what we found in the nuances of their reflections was the chance to develop a cultural appreciation. I could provide that paper, which explores that notion. Leaders at all levels need to add their discourse on the positive impact an Asia capability or literacy can have on an individual's repertoire—a team, an organisation, a business, all leaders, school leaders, community leaders, faith leaders, local government leaders, politicians. CHAIR: Thank you. Michelle? Dr Kohler : I'd just like to share a few thoughts that really relate to my submission. Firstly, I'd like to say that, when it comes to Asia—and I think some of these comments will echo Professor Louise Edwards's earlier comments—we tend to see it as 'out there': external to us, maybe a threat or an opportunity. I think we need a different conversation about who we are in relation to Asia, and the conversation occurring through this committee, I think, is vital to reimagining ourselves domestically and internationally. I also hope that this is a time for us to rethink languages education—a lot of the hearings have been focused on language learning—so that we can be more confident in our multilingualism. Next year, it will be 40 years since the landmark National Policy on Languages. We have changed, technologies and the nature of work have changed, geopolitics has changed, and thinking about language learning has changed significantly, so I agree with Louise that it is time for a new national languages policy. Whether it's a 'Lo Bianco 2027', I think we need to reimagine ourselves into the next 40 years. A policy that would serve us well—dare I say, a postmulticulturalism policy, and that would need unpacking—would lean into modern Australia and the modern challenges that this committee has been talking about, into inequality, social cohesion and so on. Finally, my submission spoke fairly strongly to the need for a differentiated approach in the area of languages education, particularly to address the situation for Indonesian. What works for Hindi and Japanese, we know, is very different to what Indonesian needs. I know this committee has been exploring the question of impact. Do we go broad for all or do we go deep for a few? My response, in a nutshell, would be, 'Both but in a staged way.' Indonesia needs an immediate intervention, in my view. The Australian community really struggles to see the intrinsic value of Indonesian, unlike perhaps that of some other languages. I think it's upon us to illuminate that value, and the notion of a lighthouse approach that I referred to in my submission and have done a bit of development work on would, I think, help us do precisely that. Then we could focus, move away from the life support, or the need to see some regrowth, and—once there is regrowth—then turn our attention to scale. That's all I want to say at this point. CHAIR: Thank you for those opening statements. Can I jump on that particular point to begin with. Why do you say that there's an urgent need for intervention with Indonesian studies now? What is the status quo, and—projecting into the future—on current trends, without intervention, how would you expect it to look in ten years time? Dr Kohler : That's a really important question. I know a number of respondents in the inquiry have referred to the possible extinction of Indonesian. I'm not sure I necessarily share that view, but I do think we are at risk of it becoming an extremely niche language. As soon as it becomes niche, it becomes more and more fragile. We don't have the supports around it. We don't have the rich ecology for it to survive in, and, potentially, that could lead to extinction. When I first started teaching in South Australia, we had 170 year-12s complete studies in Indonesian. I know, because I used to mark the papers! In the last couple of years we have had numbers under 20, and we're sitting at around that number at the moment. My own school, the School of Languages, is one of two government schools that now offer year 12 studies in Indonesian. Our school is a last resort, in some ways—it's where students go when they can't get the courses in their own schools—so we see the last people standing, and there are very few. So I say it needs urgent attention, and I think that pattern is fairly well replicated around the nation. CHAIR: Across your submissions, there are a few references to maybe what you'd describe as best practice, or programs that we can learn from—the bilingual programs in New South Wales that you refer to, Professor Fielding, and the lighthouse programs that you refer to, Michelle. Can I ask you to draw on your deep expertise in this space. Say we were to build a best practice school, one that supported teachers to be the best teachers they could be and that cultivated students' intrinsic desire to learn languages and to sustain that interest over time. What are the key ingredients for building a school that can be successful in building an engaged teaching and learning cohort that can be sustained over time? What are the most important ingredients? Prof. Fielding : There are a few really key factors. I think commitment from the leadership in that school to fostering and creating an environment that embraces language and culture in all aspects of school life is absolutely essential. If the teachers end up feeling that they're sort of isolated and are having to argue their case for why they exist in the school, it doesn't bode well in the long run. I would include, from our research in the bilingual schools in New South Wales, the model of starting young, while children don't have a fixed idea of what schooling looks like. They therefore embrace a bilingual mode of education with enthusiasm—they just see it as how school operates, and while they're still young they start to develop a level of comfort in the language and in learning through the language. I also think that the bilingual model answers one of the key questions of how we fit more hours for language learning into the curriculum, which is busy. Either a CLIL—content and language integrated learning—model or a partial immersion type of model answers that call really strongly, teaching another curriculum area and the language at the same time. Our research that looked at the NAPLAN results and other results of students showed that it wasn't time taken away from other curriculum areas or an issue for English learning for students who spoke another language at home, even if the school program was in a third or fourth language for them. CHAIR: Could you be a bit more specific and let the committee know what the findings were for the NAPLAN results for kids in the bilingual program. Prof. Fielding : Sure. Somewhat hesitantly to start with, because we didn't know what we would find, we had a look at the NAPLAN results for students who had been enrolled in the four bilingual programs in New South Wales. They had been enrolled from year 1 onwards, and we looked at their NAPLAN results in year 3 and year 5. We gathered the data from 2012 to 2016 and got some help from some statisticians to run the numbers for us to show whether or not there was a statistically significant difference. The beauty of the larger schools was that we were able to separate the students who were in the bilingual stream and the students who were in the regular class—there were two streams of students going through the primary school for three of the four schools—and compare their NAPLAN results. We saw that the bilingual streams basically outperformed the standard classroom performance in the same school. We could control for socioeconomic differences, because it was the same cohort of students being compared—with the bilingual program and without it. Internationally, you might expect a bit of a drop-off or an initial lull, so in the year 3 data you might expect that students aren't doing as well, until year 5, but then the statistical significance was shown in the year 5 data. For students who had been in the program for five or six years, if they had been in prep or kindergarten and gone the whole way through, their achievement in English hadn't dropped off but was outperforming the other students. In one school the gifted and talented students were taken out of the bilingual program—that was run in opposition to the bilingual program—and still the bilingual students outperformed them. It was not to such a high level, but it was still a noticeable trend, a noticeable uptick. CHAIR: A positive effect on NAPLAN. Prof. Fielding : Yes. CHAIR: So the key ingredients are school leadership and supporting teachers. What are the other key ingredients? Prof. Fielding : You need ongoing commitment to the funding of that program. What we saw with the rollout of the bilingual programs was that, over time, there was perhaps not a recollection of what had been committed to down the track. It worked well in schools where the staffing had been very creatively and cleverly managed by the principals in the schools. They had written language requirements into other job adverts, jobs that weren't necessarily attached to the bilingual program, so they were building up a cohort of staff. But we did see other schools where there was a struggle to actually staff the program and support it. There's also ongoing professional learning for teachers. This was new in our context, and they didn't have a heap of background information they could draw on to know what was best practice for them or how to develop, so they needed more professional development support and ongoing opportunities to network with each other and build their professional knowledge. Prof. Harbon : Importantly, too, when Ruth and I started talking about our research findings in professional contexts, such as language teacher conferences, other language teachers who were interested in the model said to us, 'Is it purely just saying what you say in the foreign language and then translating it into English?' We knew it wasn't, so we did one study, which we called our in-flight study, where we analysed the discourse of the teachers. It is a much more nuanced pedagogy, and it's seen through what we called in-flight changes in direction in how the teacher's running discourse in the classroom presents this flowing model of language. It's certainly not just translating from one language to the other. The emphasis on teacher preparation is going to be there in these models too so that teachers understand these very nuanced ways of presenting in the classroom. CHAIR: So, for the key ingredients to successful schools that sustain teacher and student interest, we've got school leadership commitment; supporting teachers; and long-term commitment so there's certainty for everyone—for staffing and students committing to it, and for parents as well. Michelle, is there anything that you'd add to that? Does immersion play a role here in getting kids interested and sustaining that interest? Dr Kohler : Certainly there's the opportunity for experiential learning, whether that's conducted locally, virtually, or of course in country. There's all of that gamut of experiential learning, which really needs to be designed into the curriculum. It needs to be really deeply embedded in the psyche and the material reality of the school and what it's teaching, with cross-curriculum connections and so on. I certainly support everything that's been said, and I would add that I think it's really important that the school identity and narrative support this kind of learning. We see this time and time again. If it's in the DNA of the school, whether it's languages or other programs, the school will talk about itself in these ways, and it will pass on to future students, families and so on. Everyone knows that this is the kind of school and the kind of product that it offers the community. So the way the school talks about itself to itself but also to the community is really, really important in the efforts that it will go to to sustain that focus—that specialist character and identity. Then all of those other things feed into that. We know that schools will do amazing things and will twist themselves in all kinds of ways to sustain some of these programs that are not easy to sustain, whether that's resourcing or teacher supply or whatever. But, because the school is committed to doing it, sees itself in these ways and projects that to the community, it will go to extraordinary lengths to make sure that that's sustainable. So, yes, we need a rich, quality curriculum with cross-curriculum planning built in so that the language program doesn't stand on its own or the broader arts program or area studies program doesn't stand on its own. Yes, it needs to be across the curriculum, but there's also that piece around identity. CHAIR: From reading your submissions, I see that the things that hinder successful and sustained programs are uncertainty as to the continuing offering of the programs and the marginalisation of and lack of support for teachers. These are teachers that teach multiple classrooms in those non-instruction time windows for very short amounts of time. They are shallow, infrequent, uncertain models of teaching where there's a lot of turnover of staff and changing of languages. Another negative is a curriculum that's not engaging. Are there any that I'm missing there as negatives? Dr Kohler : I think that pretty well covers it. CHAIR: This is more in the secondary school context. One of the submissions talks about the challenges of bringing students into country to get those immersion experiences. I hear from many submissions to this inquiry that that can be the hook that gets people hooked for a lifelong interest in a country and in language learning. But clearly this is a logistically and administratively challenging thing for already resource constrained schools to deliver. There's a proposal specifically for Indonesian systemic support for schools to fast-track international travel applications for in-country experiences. We have ACICIS for universities. Is there a need for a high schools ACICIS to help centralise a lot of those administrative logistics functions to take those costs and that complexity off the desks of schools? Prof. Harbon : Taking responsibility for a group of high school aged students when they're not yet adults is such a specific thing for the teacher accompanying that group. It's a real challenge, and the parent voice in this is going to be essential. I guess it could work. What do you think, Michelle? Dr Kohler : Liam and I have had conversations about this in the past. It would obviously not be the exact model of ACICIS as it is for young adults, but something more tailored could work, I think, as a coordination body nationally. Within South Australia, our education department has just opened up the permission to travel to Indonesia for government schools. That has certainly freed things up, and we are looking at taking a trip in about 18 months. But I do think that that's still very fragile. I do think the notion of having a reliable coordinating organisation with the heft of ACICIS, which has all the risk management and so on in place, would be reassuring for families and for communities. I think there's potential for it to work, but it would need to involve those educators and that local relationship in a way that's stronger—because they're school-aged students. Prof. Fielding : Yes, absolutely, the in-country study is extremely important, but I think it's also important to emphasise that intercultural understanding isn't only developed 'out there' somewhere else. We can build into learning experiences, for students, that being intercultural and intercultural understanding can happen in their everyday lives and within their own schools. So I think it's important to note that interacting with other cultures isn't just something that happens in a foreign space and to try and develop the change of mindset to, 'I am engaging interculturally every day of my life as a student.' To balance out—some of that learning will happen in in-country study, but we can also look at shaping what learning goes on every day in the classroom to embed cultural experience in that learning. CHAIR: I can assure you that in an electorate like mine we are never in any doubt of that. Can I ask you, Associate Professor Fielding, about home language—building on that and the loss of that. One of the things that's on my mind is how to get rich home and community language schools in new diaspora communities in Australia—I'm thinking of South-Asian communities here. How can we get that rich language capability in languages like Bengali, Telugu, Kannada and Tamil out of the homes and community language schools and into our formal education system as well? Do you have models or ideas for how we can enable that? Prof. Fielding : Yes, a couple of ideas. I think part of it is this hierarchical way that different languages have been treated in English-speaking countries—for forever, really—and looking at systemic changes we can make to balance the playing field to treat different community languages as as important for students to learn at school as Latin or French. One of the real challenges to that is when we receive student teachers training to teach their language. There are challenges in the admissions process for a master of teaching, for example, regarding which languages are recognised or which prior experience from which countries is recognised as legitimate entry requirements into a teaching program. So we do find with community languages that the teaching has to end up being done by unqualified—in local terms—teachers because there is a real hurdle for those teachers to get their qualifications recognised in Australia and to then be able to teach in the mainstream. Then it would be a balancing of preparing teachers so we could then introduce programs within schools for those same languages. But, at the moment, we face the issue that we can't recognise the qualifications of those teachers yet, and then it's hard for schools to implement new programs for those languages if they can't staff them. So we've got a bit of a catch-22 with what comes first. But I think certainly being able to recognise international qualifications, and a wider range of those, for entry and upskilling of teachers into locally recognised qualifications would be an important first step. CHAIR: Mr Soon. Mr SOON: Thank you to all for your thoughts so far. I've got two questions. My first is to Dr Kohler. You were giving us a great outline of some of the successful ingredients that go into an individual school becoming language focused and building that capability. One of the things that resonated with me in your description was how similar it is for school music programs and science competition programs, which require individual teachers to buy in and subsequently create that culture. My question is on your thoughts about how that can be scaled more broadly across a system. I think much of the discussion is on how we can boost the system-wide ability. Obviously, it has to start somewhere. It'd be great to get your thoughts on how that successful model at an individual school level can be scaled. My second question is to Professor Harbon. Given your experience working with professionals in countries throughout South-East Asia, where multilingualism is quite a common attribute, it'd be good to hear from you about how some of your engagement with these other systems, countries and professionals that have historically promoted that in the education system and their workforce—anything that we might be able to learn here in the Australian context. Dr Kohler : It's a tricky question. How do you get scale across the system, particularly at a time when there's very much a paradigm of local school decision-making and autonomous leadership and so on? Again, there are some key ingredients to that. One is that you need to make programs something special for schools to want to buy in. That's the first thing. Something that's imposed, they will do. They'll be compliant. Schools are very good at being compliant, but they won't necessarily own and drive it themselves. I think it needs to be something that they opt into. Then you build the success, and word spreads. That's what I see in working with many schools and many principals. I see that it's really the networks of principals that actually start to make things happen at a wider level, because they'll say: 'Is that what you're doing? How do I get some of that?' The network of principals is crucial to scaling up because, once principals drive it, the system will respond. That's a key ingredient—making it specialist and successful. Bias it for success from the start so that the quality story comes out and gets shared, and tapping into school leadership is crucial. Then, of course, the system has to be there with the resourcing and the program support so that, if principals do opt in, they know that the system has got their back and that it's not going to be something that they're left carrying themselves. The resourcing has to be there from a systemic point of view as well. Prof. Harbon : Thank you for your question. Yes, my extensive experience with colleagues in education systems, particularly in Indonesia and South-East Asia, show that the way that they would deal with something like this is not from a language base at all. Necessarily, their foreign language is English; it's a no-brainer. We in Australia might say, 'Which language do we pour these funds into?' There are many good arguments for which languages. But, of course, for other countries, the language is English. I've seen examples in one country that tried to deliver its STEM subjects in English, and it wasn't successful. The teachers felt lost and thrown in the deep end, and some major problems caused the whole project to be called off. I can't think of an example where an adoption of something major has gone well. The ways we've done things in Australia have been variously successful, but it's what you mentioned there with Michelle. The upscaling and the incremental growth of the projects are, I think, really the key there as well. It's worth considering in a language sphere that the United States has what they call world languages. It's a process that has English and what world languages should be spoken, and many world languages are taught to the United States schools. It's the same in Britain—many languages. New Zealand, of course, has the same kinds of threads running through its attempts with languages study, except for the strength that's gaining with the Maori programs: their te reo Maori. It's a very good question, and I don't have a very good answer for you, I'm sorry. Mr SOON: Thank you, Professor. It was one of those ones where, had they had a simple answer for us, we probably would have already adopted it straightaway. Prof. Harbon : Indeed. CHAIR: Another one of the ongoing themes of this inquiry has been the looming presence of artificial intelligence. We've heard plenty of evidence about the various ways that AI does and doesn't act as a substitute for language learning in individuals. Can I ask about the role of AI in pedagogy and in the teaching of language. I know that there's deep expertise in the effective teaching of languages in the witnesses before the committee. Are you able to share with us any of the latest thinking in the way that maybe AI conversational tools or AI as a tool of learning could play a role in the Australian education sector? Prof. Fielding : There are anecdotal examples of things I've heard recently, rather than my own experience. Obviously with caution—everyone knows that—I have heard of some current year 11 and 12 students using AI tools really responsibly to check their work to kind of use it as a verification tool. They've already constructed some language themselves; they want to just have a pair of eyes, without a person there, to verify. I think that has been a sensible approach. What I see with our pre-service teachers is also, I think, a sensible caution that AI can be useful in perhaps generating a series of questions that may be usable for a particular question-and-answer sequence but that it doesn't replace the essence of human interaction. If we want to create communicatively competent students in our schools, nothing really beats actually having a conversation with someone else. But AI tools can maybe be useful in a functional sense for verifying errors in pieces of text that they've created—for grammar checking and that sort of approach. I haven't heard of anything more cutting edge in terms of what has been possible yet. Dr Kohler : Yes. I'd support that, Ruth. Really, to me, AI becomes another kind of interlocutor, and that interlocutor can basically help you improve. It can show you what not to do and it can help you check and so on. Students are very savvy around AI—very good at judging what is worthwhile listening to from AI or not. I think it's a very pragmatic tool for students, and it does help, I think, with metalinguistic awareness, the ability to look at how language is performing and playing, at the kinds of meanings that it can generate and at how meaning can be manipulated in certain ways. I think it's also good for humour, which never goes astray in language learning. CHAIR: I like that framing of it as it as another interlocutor. The services that certainly my kids have seen are actual verbal conversational AI tools, where you can have a conversation in another language and they'll say, 'Oh, I wouldn't put it that way.' You get notes from it, during the conversation, from having to do it. Clearly, talking to a robot will never be as stimulating as talking to a human being, but, as a zero-cost supplement for repetitive-reinforcement-type training, acknowledging that costs of direct instruction of language training have always been an obstacle to scaling it up, it seems like in a systems-wide sense it might be a useful tool of pedagogy rather than a substitute for the need to learn language. Dr Kohler : Yes, and I think the capacity that you develop in students to generate queries for AI is a substantive chunk of learning because it's actually about them using the power of language to boss something around. They're very happy to wield that power, but, yes, I think it's really instructive for them about how language works. CHAIR: I'll just ask a final question, around teachers associations. I think your submissions evoke the experience of being a language teacher quite well, in that it is, as currently structured, quite isolating being generally the only teacher at the school teaching a language, having to move from class to class to class and not having that kind of agency and control over a relationship with a class in an ongoing way that other domains might have. In that context, what is the importance of language associations, Indonesian-language associations in particular, the granular ones that provide support? What role do they play, and what bigger role could they play if we better supported them? Prof. Harbon : Language associations and language teacher associations are highly sought-after saviours for many a teacher who has to prepare this by then and is wondering whether there are any colleagues out there with resources they can share. I think social media has proved, especially for Indonesian-language teachers in Australia recently, that there is a very generous approach to sharing thoughts, ideas, resources. They specifically, for the languages, could become more productive and more useful should they have a funded role in the work that teacher education and teacher preparation courses do—if there were some kind of role for them formally. But they've grown from the bottom up, in many situations. The professional association itself, the Australian Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations, and its state and territory groups are the essential way for language teachers to have a voice in a wider context—they could be visible and audible in the public arena—than they could have being purely the Indonesian teachers association. Many teachers say, 'I've got time for the local association but not time for the state or national association.' Teachers are stressed for time and so on. It has got a role and it could have a greater role. I think many associations for the different languages would, in that way, be delighted to be put to task and use some funds. CHAIR: Michelle? Dr Kohler : I think the ecology of associations is really important for people starting out in the profession. The local language-specific association plays a vital role, I think, in whether they remain in the profession or not. So I think there's an incredible influence there just in that survival period but also with curriculum pedagogy and the network, that sense of belonging to the profession. The state umbrella associations and the national body have always been much more in the advocacy space, the political space, if you like. Local language-specific associations are for curriculum pedagogy and belonging, and state and national are much more around advocacy for the profession as a whole and political agitation, if you like. They all have a role to play. They're all very nested. But I think, for my money at the moment, for Indonesian in particular, the investment would have to be at the local level. Our association has nearly folded multiple times over the last few years here; it is hanging on by a thread. So, if I had to do anything immediately, that's where I'd go. CHAIR: For Indonesian, which we've talked about as requiring an urgent intervention, teachers associations might be a useful intervention point to help break up that spiral that we're seeing at the moment. Is that fair to say? Dr Kohler : Yes, absolutely—key player. CHAIR: Wonderful. I think we're at time. Thank you, all, for sharing your expertise with us here today. You'll be sent a copy of the transcript of your evidence and will have an opportunity to request corrections to transcription errors. Please send your responses to any questions taken on notice during this hearing to the secretariat by close of business Wednesday 1 April 2026. The committee will now suspend. Proceedings suspended from 13:17 to 13:46 .