Making Chinese learnable : strategies for the retention of language learners

The retention of learners of Chinese is a key problem in primary and secondary schools in countries where monolingual English-only literacy theories prevail. In the UK, the retention of Chinese language learners is fragile across all levels of schooling (Zhang & Li, 2010). Likewise, in Australia the vast majority of learners of Chinese (some 94 per cent) drop out before the end of secondary school (Asia Education Foundation, 2010; Orton, 2008; State of Victoria, 2012). Further, many teachers of Chinese have not had the education necessary to counteract the high dropout rate among learners (Lo Bianco & Liu, 2007). These problems are significant concerns for such countries’ linguistic engagement with China and Chinese people throughout the world.