Abstract
Language teaching in South Australian secondary schools is standing at a crossroads. Since the introduction of the revised South Australian Certificate of Education (SACE) curriculum in 2011, the number of Year 12 (Stage 2) students studying a foreign language has decreased by 26.4 % (MLTASA Inc. 2015, p. 3). This is no doubt partially due to the SACE now requiring students to only study four subjects at Year 12 instead of five and allowing students the choice to count the new compulsory Research Project subject towards their Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank (ATAR) for entry into university (SACE Board of SA 2014a, 2015a; Watson 2010; SATAC 2014; Spence-Brown 2014). Another mitigating factor is the number of pre-requisite subjects required for entry into popular university courses (e.g. Engineering at the University of Adelaide, see University of Adelaide, 2014, p. 6) and often also the inability for schools to attract suitably qualified language teachers (e.g. Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group 2014, p. 12; Editorial The Australian 2010), a result of the ‘vicious cycle’ (Williams 2014) forming from a flow-on effect; if less students study a language at Year 12, fewer students go on to tertiary language study and then go on to become language teachers.
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Notes
- 1.
Having commissioned two in-house reports, which have not yet been made publicly available, the Department for Education and Child Development (DECD) and the SACE Board have produced resources geared towards shedding light for students, parents and schools on why languages are important for future careers. These resources have only just been made available and can be found at http://betalanguagesgivesyoutheedge.weebly.com/.
- 2.
- 3.
In order of Stage 1 subject enrolments at Continuers level (SACE Board of SA 2014b), Japanese, Italian, German, French, Chinese and Indonesian.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
The SACE Stage 1 German course introduces a large and very specific focus on working with and understanding a wide range of text types (SACE Board of SA 2014b, pp. 23–24); however, their definition refers to texts such as advertisements, timetables and letters, which Hammond et al (1992 in Paltridge 2001, p.239) identifies by the term ‘genre,’ which is why there is sometimes confusion between the terms text-based and genre-based (Paltridge 2001).
- 7.
Please contact the author of this chapter for further results.
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Bond, M. (2017). The Text-Based Approach in the German as Foreign Language Secondary Classroom. In: Mickan, P., Lopez, E. (eds) Text-Based Research and Teaching. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59849-3_11
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