• Organisation

For a country that still has a rather monolingually anglophone mainstream culture, the efforts that Australia in general, and the State of Victoria in particular have made towards a language policy are truly outstanding -- all the more since the interest in a serious language policy at both the federal and the state levels has only been developing quite recently. Milestones of this development are the 1984 Report on a National Language Policy by the federal Senate Standing Committee on Education and the Arts, and Joseph Lo Bianco's document, National Policy on Languages (Lo Bianco, 1987). Karen Petersen's study Zur Situation des Deutschen als Fremdsprache im multikulturellen Australien: eine Bestandsaufnahme am Beispiel des Bundesstaates Victoria (Petersen, 1993) gives an interesting outsider's view on the development that German as a school subject in Victoria had taken at the time the study was undertaken, in the late eighties and the early nineties.2 Fernandez, Pauwels and Clyne (1994) provide an Australia-wide picture. Comparing these analyses with recent documents on state government policy such as the Languages Other Than English Strategy Plan of 1993 and the Report to the Minister for Education of 1994, both by the Ministerial Advisory Council on Languages other than English (Ministerial Advisory Council, 1993 and 1994), the most recent available edition of the Victorian Certificate of Education Study Design for German (Board of Studies, 1994), the CSF, the Curriculum and Standards Framework Languages Other Than English (Board of Studies, 1995) or the advice brochure for teachers how to implement the CSF, Using the CSF Languages Other Than English (LOTE) (Board of Studies, 1998), one can easily see how far the administrative framework for teaching and learning languages in school has come in the last decade.