Languages face chop as Macquarie focuses on ‘cultural fluency’

Australian academics are alarmed at Macquarie University’s proposal to ditch more than half of its language programmes and shift its focus from linguistic expertise to “cultural proficiency”.

A Macquarie discussion paper outlines plans to stop teaching Croatian, German, Greek, Italian and Russian because of a “strategic direction” to prioritise languages useful for trade or “global governance”.

Full-time equivalent enrolments in the five languages total no more than a few dozen each, with most declining. While student numbers in the more popular Chinese, French, Japanese and Spanish programmes are also dropping, these languages are considered to have more career relevance.

Global trends require the “narrowing of languages of interest to those that are useful in global economies and the geopolitical and socioeconomic climate of the 21st century Asia-Pacific”, the paper asserts.

It says the number of languages taught on Australian campuses has plummeted from almost 70 in the late 1990s to fewer than 20 today. “Fewer people are studying languages in a formal educational context than ever before, and the natural pipeline from school to university is now drying up.”

Pedagogical trends also require Macquarie to rethink the purpose of language teaching, the paper says. “It is now widely recognised that fluency is seldom achieved…language learning requires a shift from linguistic proficiency/fluency to cultural proficiency/fluency.

“The traditional focus on linguistic fluency is now shown to be increasingly unsuitable by the ease with which generative AI and machine translation can translate between languages but fails to bring nuance and depth from the cultural and human context of language.”

John Hajek, president of the Languages and Cultures Network for Australian Universities, said this was a “wrong-headed” response to AI-induced superficiality.

“They need to…increase the language proficiency of their students, not move away from it,” said Professor Hajek, an Italian specialist at the University of Melbourne. “Language and culture are deeply intertwined.”

Professor Hajek said it was illogical to jettison the languages of Germany and Italy – the world’s third- and eighth-largest economies, according to the International Monetary Fund – on economic grounds. And he said claiming that linguistic fluency was unachievable was like deciding not to teach history or physics because students would never learn enough to become historians or physicists.

Universities use strategies such as immersion, exchange and study abroad to improve both linguistic fluency and global citizenship, he added.

Macquarie’s website says the university is ranked in the world’s top 40 for linguistics and offers the “widest range of European languages” in New South Wales. “Language is the key to connecting with people and understanding their cultures,” it says.

Professor Hajek said Macquarie had long been a national leader in language teaching and research. “Reducing the number of language offerings is potentially damaging to the university’s well-deserved reputation.”

Times Higher Education asked Macquarie whether it now proposed to judge would-be foreign students by their “cultural proficiency” rather than their ability in English, the university’s language of instruction. It did not answer, but said it was “committed to delivering curricula that address evolving priorities and prepare students for the jobs of today and the future”.

“The proposed shift from the discipline of languages and cultures to a discipline of global studies upholds this commitment,” a spokeswoman said.

She said “pre-consultation” on the proposal would conclude on 17 November, with “formal” consultation planned for early 2024.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com