Resistance to Monoligualism: School Principals and Head of Languages’ Voices on Factors that Promote and Deter Languages Education in Queensland, Australia

Resistance to Monoligualism: School Principals and Head of Languages’ Voices on Factors that Promote and Deter Languages Education in Queensland, Australia

Despite ever-increasing multicultural and multilingual diversity in Australia, the learning of languages, as a curriculum area, has long struggled to achieve recognition and stability. This could not be more true than in the state of Queensland, where despite mandatory language learning in the middle years, the percentage of high school students graduating with a language has consistently hovered around 8% for the last three decades. In this chapter, we draw on analysis of 18 semi-structured interviews with School Principals and Heads of Languages departments in ten metropolitan state high schools whose language programmes may be considered counter-examples to the current state of play in the Australian languages education landscape. These interviews explored participants’ views regarding the factors that may contribute to enabling the development and maintenance of language teaching in their schools as well as potential deterrents leading to discontinuation of programmes in other school contexts. The data provide evidence that resistance to the prevalent ‘monolingual mindset’ in these specific contexts is achieved through the interaction of several elements within the ecology of the school community, and specifically, through key stakeholders’ exercise of agency in a concerted effort to ensure the sustainability of languages programmes.