Efforts of Federal Government

In 1980s，Federal government issued the first official language policy，“National Policy of Language”in the Australian history，starting the traditional and efforts of promoting Australia to be a multi-cultural and linguistic society.The following“Language Learning Australia National Chamber”further strengthened the significances of developing high-level proficiency in Asian languages in promoting Australia’s international influence.And the 1990s and early 2000s marked even greater efforts to promote school-level Asian language studies.By envisaging a much larger Chinese economy in the future，Chinese language has been one of the language priorities since the early 1990s.

The national language policy“Australia Language Policy”was introduced in 1991 and decided Chinese as one of the 14 important languages to be integrated in compulsory school curriculum.Three years later，the Council of Australian Governments(COAG)working group of Rudd government published a report to a strategy to radically increase the number of Australians Asian languages upon the estimation of East Asia becoming Australia’s top merchandise export markets between then and 2012，and Japanese，Chinese(Mandarin)，Indonesian，and Korean are identified as four language priorities to focus(Rudd，1994).This report directed several government funds flow to organisations such as The National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools(NALSAS)to improve participation and proficiency levels in language learning in four targeted Asian languages and to support the studies of Asia across the curriculum(NALSAS，2003)，and calling for 12 percent of Australian school graduates in the year 2020 to be fluent in one of the four targeted Asian languages—Chinese，Japanese，Indonesian or Korean.As a consequence，the most markable Australia’s Asia-focus initiative in the recent decade is the implementation of National Asian Languages and Studies in Schools Program(NALSSP)in 2008，which promised over AU$62 millions fund would flow to promoting the targeted Asian language between 2008 and 2012.The result of this initiative yielded steep rise in the number of schools students learning Asian languages，including Chinese.This program targeted at three major achievements including①equipping flexible delivery and pathways in schools，②increasing teacher supply and support，and③stimulating student demand.