Seeking connection: why university students study an additional language

Monica Sestito

Australian university students who want to study an additional language find themselves in a contradictory conjuncture. 

On the one hand, language courses have become the most economical humanities subjects for domestic tertiary students. The controversial Job-Ready Graduates Package, announced under the former Coalition government in June 2020 and legislated in October that year, exempted languages from the considerable fee increases imposed on all other humanities subjects. 

What’s more, it significantly cut the maximum student fee for language studies – not that the former government emphasised this aspect of the package. As commentators have quipped, it instead remained ‘lost in translation.’ 

On the other hand, however, several Australian universities have moved to axe language programs. Asian language programs have suffered most, though not exclusively.

In the last two years, as the financial fallout from the pandemic and chronic funding issues accumulated, Swinburne University decided to discontinue all language programs. Meanwhile, La Trobe University moved to end its Hindi, Indonesian and Greek courses. 

University students, then, face a paradoxical situation of being both economically incentivised to study additional languages and increasingly hard pressed to find tertiary institutions with a broad range of language offerings and the resources to maximise their educational experience. It’s a contradiction that students often feel acutely. 

University of Melbourne undergraduate Xavier Dupe, who is completing a concurrent diploma in Spanish and Latin American studies alongside his Bachelor of Arts, has noticed that “structural barriers” make language-learning hard. 

“Public education in general is underfunded. Classes keep getting bigger due to budget cuts, which makes all learning, but especially learning languages, more difficult,” he says. 

That’s a sentiment with which other students concur. For Ben Fok, who started studying German at high school and decided to continue with it as a part of their breadth subjects, “reductions in funding and worsened conditions for teachers [is] reducing the quality of the language learning experience.” 

Liza Stephens, who also decided to undertake a diploma in Spanish alongside her Arts degree, doesn’t feel that the Job-Ready Graduates Package has significantly promoted the importance of language learning. Instead, “there seems to be less emphasis on additional languages as a crucial skill for entering the workforce,” she says.

Yet, despite the structural issues that students face in pursuing language studies, the pleasures, gains, and even the challenges of this experience continue to make it so rewarding. 

“Being able to connect with more of the world,” for Xavier, is one of the biggest factors motivating his language studies. Learning Spanish has opened him up to a “rich history of radical resistance movements in Latin America”, for which he is grateful. 

Ben and Liza are driven by similar desires for historical, cultural, and political connection. 

For Liza, this takes the form of pushing herself everyday to engage with news content in Spanish. She wants to gain different perspectives on current affairs and deepen her understanding of the politics of varied Spanish-speaking countries. Learning additional languages, she says, is one the most useful undertakings university students should embark on to enrich their cultural and political worldview. 

Ben also uses their German to stay up to date with current affairs, on top of planning future research rabbit holes opened up by their language skills. “I really want to read more about Germany’s modern history,” they say, “particularly the revolutionary period between 1918 and 1923, as well as the resistance to the Nazis.” 

Liza, Xavier and Ben all aspire to use their language skills through travelling overseas, but, interestingly, that was not the main way they see their language skills becoming meaningful aspects of their life on an ongoing basis. Nor did they talk about additional languages as the pillars of their careers. 

This paints a very different picture to the motivations of language learners than the one implied in the Job-Ready Graduate Package. Although acquiring proficiency in multiple languages undoubtedly opens up employment opportunities, university students’ language learning desires are difficult to reduce to an economic calculation – whether that’s future job prospects or diminished tuition fees. 

They seem to want something more: interpersonal, cultural, political, historical, and personal enrichment. And the small gains in the long, almost infinite, process of language learning often seem sweetest.

“It’s so nice to watch Spanish films or listen to Spanish music and realise you understand more than what you expected to,” Liza remarks. 

Ben agrees. “Whenever I’m able to understand something in German – a news article, a book, a TV show – I’m reminded of why I’m learning a language, which can help make some of the more tedious work worth it.”