Chinese and Australian communities must come together to improve cultural and language understanding, promoting trust between the two Asia-Pacific nations, said an Aussie expert.
Australian business leaders have consistently argued the nation's foreign language capability has been lagging as the transition from compulsory language study in junior years until senior and tertiary education has been falling.
This is especially so as Australia increases its economic engagement with China and the broader Asia-Pacific to aid a difficult transition to services-based growth, which has led the government to implement wide-ranging programs to increase Asian cultural engagement.
Though total number of Australian students studying Chinese language since 2008 have risen to 4.7 percent of the school population, that number includes background and home speakers and does not reflect the numbers of non-background speakers, a report recently released by the Australia-China Relations Institute (ACRI) shows.
More alarmingly, the retention rate for language learners to become proficient in Chinese has dropped.
The report shows only 2.4 percent of Chinese learners are studying at Grade 12 level, 0.1 percent of total student cohort, despite Australia needing 12 percent of graduates proficient in Chinese.
Of those, its estimated only 400 are non-background speakers, down 20 percent since 2007.
"Proficiency in more than one language is a basic skill in the 21st century," the report's author, University of Melbourne modern language researcher Dr. Jane Orton, told Xinhua.
Australia cannot rely on Chinese-Australians for language proficiency as only 4.5 percent of the workforce have a Chinese background, Orton said, making independent understanding crucial not only for economic, but the wider bilateral relationship essential.
"If we could understand (Chinese), we'd feel better about managing (emerging power) and not be unduly alarmed, and perhaps, participate better in ways that might be advantageous," Orton said.
"There have been very clear mis-understandings that have led to dramas, flair-ups and pull-backs and things which never should have happened.
"Somebody should have said 'no, that's not what that means, that's just for their (domestic political) sake, don't worry about it'.
"But there is just not that level of trust (between Australia and China), there's not that layered in relationship."
Orton said there needs to be a greater dialogue between Chinese teachers and the non-Chinese learners in Australia, similar to what Japan did in the 1980s, to internationalise the language, making language learning, and hence the broader relationship, much more successful.
"For the moment, the Chinese own (the language), and (think) it's theirs to give. They haven't really got as customer orientated (focus) to say well, how does it seem to (foreigners)?," Orton said.
"We have legitimate views about Chinese language which are not theirs because we're not learning it as a first language, we're not speaking it as a first language.
"(We're) brining (our) whole experience and we see it differently and (Chinese teachers) need to understand that."
In the 1980s, the Japanese ministry of education talked to Australia about what it would take to get the nation's students interested and able to learn the language.
This level of engagement is telling, given six times as many Australian students are studying Japanese than Chinese as a second language.
Australia and China need to put into practice lessons learned from the Australia-Japan engagement and other international language programs as it's not a unique set of issues affecting Chinese, Orton said.
"ESL was the same," Orton said, noting that it wasn't until the 1990s that things changed.
"England owned English until somebody stood up and said this is a bunch of colonial nonsense, that's not what we want."
