Transition and Continuity from the Primary Level t...
There has been an issue of lack of continuity of language programs，including Chinese，from the primary level to secondary school level.This lack of continuity is itself ref lective of different vintages and rationales for LPP.Primary schools have tended to offer first language or mother tongue maintenance programs whereas secondary school language education programming has tended to emphasize second，or foreign language studies.The language ecology of Chinese encompasses both and as a result Chinese language programs typically suffer from a lack of continuation between the school levels.Students who have studied Chinese at primary school might be required to study another language such as Indonesian or French at secondary school;those who have studied Italian or Japanese at primary school might be asked to study Chinese from the very beginning at secondary school.
This practice is quite disruptive and inefficient as it drains energy from many programs and affects motivation of learners whose attainments of language studies at primary school are likely to dissipate or not to be recognised when they enter a secondary school.For Chinese studies，this lack of continuity is consequent of two situations.Some students are no longer motivated to learn Chinese when they enter second school，so they simply discontinue their Chinese learning.Some other students do want to continue their Chinese learning when they enter secondary school，but find that Chinese is not among languages that are offered at their schools.Though some schools which do not offer Chinese as part of their curricula allow their students to take Chinese study externally at another school，the effort required of students to juggle their timetables and travel to another school is so great that many students simply give up.
This shows a level of weakness in the design system for Australian LPP for acquisition of Chinese.There is a lack of appropriately or systematically alignment except in the most general ways.As a result，ambitious centrally determined policy comes to have ambiguous or even reverse effects in its implementation.The lack of systematic transition in Chinese from primary schools to secondary schools is not therefore a problem of random failure but a systemic weakness in the language education planning architecture.If parents，and social and political elites can mobilise at various political levels to demand provision of key and strategically important languages，the issue of transition and continuity from primary to secondary schools may be improved.
Another clear indicator of this asymmetry between the specific language requirements of LPP and other demands is in student grouping.Students who have learned Chinese in primary schools often find that at secondary school they are grouped with students who have not had any prior exposure to or learning of Chinese.This has inevitable discouraging effect as it invalidates prior acquisition.This discouraging effect is experienced by both second language learners and by background speakers，whose families will often prefer community-delivered Chinese language programs since a greater degree of curriculum continuity can be assured in a language-devoted setting.When these students and their parents choose to remain in the school program，it is observable that both advanced students and beginning students are discouraged while in the same class，with advanced students feeling learning activities too easy to be stimulated to learn，and beginning students feeling learning tasks too difficult and it is impossible for them to compete with the advanced students.