I personally have a problem with how some of the LOTEs scale. Given the fact that we know how scaling works (compare X subject cohorts performance in this subject to their performance in other subjects) isn't it a bit racist? For example, I'd assume most people who do Chinese FL are most likely, well, Chinese [...] So scaling is no longer based on how difficult the subject is, but rather how much the certain race emphasises education and doing well at school etc. [...] I personally think LOTE scalings have a tendancy to be racist.
I understand your point that LOTE scaling doesn't seem equitable - but "racism" is the wrong term for this phenomenon. If I've read your post correctly, I think you're conflating slightly the
fact that a language scales well with the issue of
largely "mother tongue cohorts" (most of the Chinese cohort are ethnically Chinese; possibly harder for white guys to succeed.) There are inequalities created by both phenomena, but they are largely separate, and IMHO, neither are explicitly racist.
So on the scaling first. LOTE scaling itself is not a form of discrimination or bias on the basis of race. As I understand it, it is simply that:
- cohort for language X performs competitively in VCE
- there is a language bonus
- therefore language X scales well.
This is exactly the same process for Latin, which of course has no native speakers:
- cohort for Latin performs competitively in VCE
- there is a language bonus
- therefore Latin scales well.
There is no
racial bias here, but there are socio-economic ones. Language X may tend to attract people from a culture X ("mother tongue cohort"), which heavily values education (Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Greek...) Indeed, the vast majority of immigrants I know, regardless of country, have an abiding belief in the value of education. But this is simply a statistical adjustment on the basis of the educational performance of the cohort - not a racially-motivated judgement.
Furthering this point, Latin tends to be taught in wealthy private schools only, which again forms a cohort of students whose families value education, and enjoy educational privilege. Again, as above, the scores achieved are manipulated statistically, and there is clearly no judgement made on the basis of race. Only on the basis of cohort performance.
Even if a given language tends to attract, in roughly equal proportions, both foreign and mother tongue speakers (Indonesian), there is of course the slight complicating factor that all language students, regardless of whether they are mother-tongue speakers or not, tend to perform above average in VCE - thus further inviting high scaling. This is where the greater inequality lies, between those of different language backgrounds - the cohort, while strong generally, differs in terms of its prior subject preparation, i.e. language exposure in childhood.
I do hope that none of my reasoning here is spurious, or worse, that it was correct yet bleedingly obvious! I simply thought it would be beneficial to draw a clearer dinstinction between the two LOTE issues. Once this has been achieved, I would really like to discuss the inequalities in the "mother tongue cohort" phenomenon, as I feel it greatly disadvantages people such as myself, who come from monolingual English backgrounds. I might write this separately, just to avoid too lengthy a post.
Home
Help
Search
Login
