The Presence of Background Speaker/S in VCE Chines...
The creation of VCE Chinese LCS has a clear goal which is to cater the“genuine”L2 learners，who are not home speakers.This purpose has been made obvious from a 2017 media release statement(“Australia:Encouraging More Victorian Students to Study Chinese”)，“this sensible addition to the Victorian curriculum will encourage even more students from a non-Chinese background to learn modern standard Chinese”.By achieving this goal，the enrolment criteria are much tighter than VCE Chinese SL and reduce the allowing time for students to live and or study in a Chinese speaking society.Students who have spent six months or more on education in a school where Chinese is the medium of instruction，or two years(24 months)or more residence in any of the VCAA nominated countries or regions are not eligible for applying for LCS，while SL allowing students to have 12 months learning experiences or 3 years living experiences.
Unfortunately，the tight enrolment criteria fail to guarantee a backgroundspeaker-free student cohort.In the 2018 to 2019 offering period，there was only one student among the total 63 enrolled CLS students achieved 50 out of 50 in the final result，whose family name clearly suggested at least one recent Chinese ancestry in the family.This leaves doubt about how would CLS clearly define a“background speaker”，who might have Chinese speaking family member(s)at home since birth and，whether born in Australia or not，have been schooled in Australia.If someone has at least one parent or grandparent as native Chinese speaker，but has not spent six months or more education in a school where Chinese is the medium of instruction，or two years(24 months)or more residence in any of the VCAA nominated countries or regions，should this person be defined as background speaker or not?Does presence of students like this undermine the rationale of LCS creation?