Language learning (or not)

Recently I have been pondering the role of opportunity and motivation in learning second languages. I grew up in country towns and small regional cities in Australia. My school years spanned the change in Australia’s official migration policy from assimilation to multiculturalism. There were a small number of students from non-English speaking backgrounds (maybe born overseas, probably children of migrants) at my primary school, maybe as many as a quarter at my first high school and rather less at my second and third high schools. The two biggest groups of countries of origin were The Netherlands/Germany/Poland and Italy/Greece/Malta. Whether by their own choice or by overt or covert pressure from the Aussie children, most of them were determined not to be, or not to be seen as, ‘wogs’. I can’t remember hearing any of them speaking anything other than English, or even saying that they spoke another language at home. (Maybe they did, but didn’t ever say anything about it.) The Dutch/German/Polish children assimilated more and quicker than the Italian/Greek/Maltese. 

My primary school had no classes in any language other than English. The only exposures to other languages I got were in the ABC’s Singing and Listening books (we also had similar songbooks at home) and war comics. My first high school had French classes, but only from second year, and I only went there for one year. (My older sisters did five and four years with very little to show for it.) My second high school had electives (one lesson per week for one semester) in German and a local Indigenous language, but there were always more immediately interesting choices. My third high school had German throughout but the only way I could have done it in my final year was if I’d done it for four years before that, which I obviously hadn’t.

Not surprisingly, with zero opportunity and motivation, my grand total learning of any language other than English during my school years was zero. Perhaps the biggest opportunity outside school came when a young Japanese woman came to live with my great-aunt and -uncle, but they lived in Melbourne, we saw them every few months, and our role was to help her practice English. 

Throughout high school, English classes moved from any learning about structure, meaning and communication to literature (novels, poems, plays) and attempting to understand, analyse, discuss themes, character motivation and development, and produce our own. I was regularly near the top of my class, but was never actively enthusiastic about in the same way as music, maths, science etc. (History, geography, civics etc were lumped into one subject called social studies, about which I remember basically nothing. I developed my interest in those subjects entirely by myself.) 

Intriguingly, I did not do English in my final year of high school. The only requirement in that state of Australia at that time was at least one science subject and at least one humanities subject. I started English, but the first topic was British World War 1 poetry. Yeah, right. I approached the class coordinator and asked to switch to physics. Despite starting two months after everyone else, I was easily in the top three in the class. The physics teacher was delighted. I can’t remember what the English teacher teacher said. (My humanities subjects were music performance/theory and history/analysis and my science subjects were maths 1 and 2 and physics. As far as I can remember, I was the only student who did more than one subject from each stream. Everyone else did four from one and one from the the other (and generally scored low on that one subject. I came second overall mostly because I didn’t have a low-scoring subject.))

Throughout all this time I had an interest in punny riddles and jokes with my father and maternal grandfather, crosswords with my father and music, with terminology and cassette/record/CD covers and notes in Italian, German and French. 

At university, I sang in an increasing number of languages, sometimes not knowing what the text meant. There were electives called Italian for singers, German for singers and French for singers, but I wasn’t a singing major and had enough electives already. (As far as I know, they focussed on pronunciation and maybe song texts.) There was a combined Bachelor of Music/Bachelor of Arts course which I never seriously considered and probably wouldn’t have chosen a language or languages even if I had decided to do it. I don’t know if linguistics was available then. The university now has subjects in it.

After two years working in another state, I moved back to that city and did musicology as an enrolled student and Latin as an auditing student. This involved only grammar/translation and not speaking or listening. That’s the grand sum total of my formal language learning.

I don’t know how well or badly I would have taken to language learning if I’d had the opportunity and how much motivation I would have had; whether I would have seen it/them as useless in an English-speaking country in which even children from those national/language backgrounds didn’t speak it/them, or whether I would have accepted the challenge, applied my all-round intelligence and interest in language in general, in order to be able to do something that no-one else around me could do. And I will never know.