Discussion

The introduction of LCS aims at encouraging the sustainability of non-Chinese background student cohort through the last two years of high school and even continuing the study at tertiary level.It also resonates Australia’s decades efforts of promoting Asian languages at school level.It seems that LCS is welcome by growing numbers of Victorian schools.

According to CLTAV，only 3 schools between 2017 and 2019 offer LCS，and the enrolment in 2018 was 62，grew to 78 in 2019.Both the number of schools offering this course and the enrolment are expecting a positive growth in the following years.Although the number of enrolled students in 2020 is still unclear，the number of offering schools has increased to 97 according to VCAA website.

While we are happy to see LCS’s healthy growth in Victoria，the program’s two years of operation have exposed some issues that need to be reviewed.

LCS follows the standard 200-hour instruction time as other language courses，the medium language used in the classroom，as well as for the assessment，are both English and Chinese.Due to the inherent difficulty of Chinese language，with the same studying time，VCE Chinese Language students can only achieve much lower language proficiency level than their counterparts who choose to study European languages.On top of that，the using of English as 50%of classroom and assessment medium language further halved the contacting hour to Chinese language.This situation has the danger of compromising the language proficiency level students can achieve upon graduation.

The inclusion of English as the medium language in the Chinese studies could also signal the danger of shifting the teaching and learning focus from Chinese language learning towards English language based cultural study.This may also leave a dangerous signal to students that they do not need to learn Chinese language to successfully graduate from LCS.

To use both English and Chinese as the medium language in the classroom does reduce L2 learners’learning difficulty.However，at the same time，50%of the assessments are test in English and requirement on Chinese language is visibly reduced comparing to VCE Chinese SL.The inclusion of English as the medium language in the Chinese studies could also signal the danger of shifting the teaching and learning focus from Chinese language learning towards English language based cultural study.It is obvious that culture cannot be separated from language teaching and learning.However，high language proficiency could never be achieved with insufficient teaching hours.

LCS has a clear goal to cater the“genuine”L2 learners，who are not home speakers.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.However，its current selection criteria seem to be powerless in preventing home speakers from enrolling in the subject and the presence of high scorer with Chinese surname already announced the defect of the enrolment criteria.LCS seems to have great difficulties in being a Chinese language course opening to students without any Chinese background or who are not home speakers.