When the federal parliament announced its inquiry into Building Asia Capability in Australia through the Education System and Beyond, it marked an important opportunity to rethink what regional literacy means in practice. The question is not simply whether Australians value Asia, but how well we understand it — through language, culture, and the everyday exchanges that form genuine connection.
Among the Asian languages taught in Australia, Indonesian offers a particularly useful case study. It is geographically close, linguistically accessible, and strategically significant. Yet its teaching and learning patterns mirror the broader challenges of Asia capability in education: early enthusiasm followed by steep decline once the subject becomes an elective.
The Inquiry and the Indonesian Case
The current parliamentary inquiry invites submissions on how Australia can strengthen Asia capability across all sectors. While many contributions will focus on macro-level coordination — involving DFAT, Education, and state systems — the most direct impact lies where policy meets practice: in classrooms.
In the case of Indonesian, the issue is not whether the language matters, but how it is taught and experienced. In many schools lessons rely on ageing resources that do not reflect the Indonesia of today — an archipelago of innovation, creativity, and cultural vitality. Teachers work hard to make lessons meaningful, but often without the modern materials that can bridge the gap between textbook learning and contemporary Indonesia.
Policy discussions often highlight the need for Asian language proficiency, yet the conditions that shape classroom experience receive less attention. Curriculum frameworks alone cannot drive engagement. Students respond to relevance — to the sense that what they are learning connects with real people and contemporary culture. When classroom materials lag behind modern Indonesia, students are left learning about a static idea of a dynamic neighbour.
Formal Indonesian Still Matters
It would be easy to mistake this for an argument against traditional or formal Indonesian. It isn’t. As I wrote in Is Teaching Formal Indonesian Still Relevant?, formal Indonesian remains essential. It provides the structural backbone — the grammar, register, and discipline that allow learners to move confidently between settings, dialects, and styles of communication.
But language learning works best when that foundation is contextualised. Students need opportunities to see and hear the language in motion — to recognise its rhythm, humour, and warmth. Structured lessons form the scaffold, but the lived experience of the language, through film, sound, and cultural context, is what turns knowledge into capability.
Authentic exposure also builds empathy and understanding. A well-chosen video clip, street interview, or classroom scene can convey cultural norms — from how people greet elders to how they express modesty — in a way that textbook explanations can seldom capture. These are the moments that move students from memorising phrases to understanding meaning.
The Middle Years: Where Continuity is Won or Lost
Research and experience both show that the middle years — typically Years 7 and 8 — are where engagement in Asian languages begins to taper. When language learning becomes an elective, enrolments drop sharply. In From Sate to Sour: Why Indonesian Studies Lose Flavour After Year Eight, I noted that this transition often determines whether students persist or disengage.
What happens in these years matters enormously. If lessons feel meaningful and achievable, students continue. If they feel dated or disconnected, they don’t. This pattern has a cascading effect: fewer students in senior years mean smaller university cohorts and, ultimately, fewer future teachers. The result is a slow erosion of capability just when regional understanding is most needed.
Teachers often describe this as the “continuity cliff”. Students enter high school excited by the freshness of a new language, but by Year 8, other subjects compete for their attention. Keeping that curiosity alive requires resources that mirror students’ own media environment — visual, story-driven, and culturally current.
From Policy to Practice
The parliamentary inquiry is well placed to address this. Asia capability cannot be achieved through rhetoric alone. It depends on teachers who are confident, supported, and resourced to make language learning engaging and sustainable.
Improving classroom resources — especially those that combine structure with authenticity — is one of the most immediate and achievable steps. Teachers need lessons that are accurate, adaptable, and visually rich; students need to feel that what they’re learning connects to something real. When those conditions are met, participation stabilises and language study becomes part of a natural educational pathway, not an exception.
Equipping teachers with strong, classroom-ready materials also supports retention in the profession. A confident teacher — one who has access to high-quality tools and authentic content — is more likely to stay inspired and to sustain student interest across the school year.
Insights from Our Submission
In our submission to the parliamentary inquiry, Strengthening Indonesian Language Learning through Classroom Resources, we argue that improving resource quality is among the most practical levers available to strengthen Asia capability. While policy frameworks and recruitment pipelines are essential, the classroom is where capability is built day to day — and where it can falter when teachers lack contemporary materials.
The submission highlights that many Indonesian teachers still rely on outdated resources that fail to reflect the Indonesia their students see online — a nation of digital innovation, environmental leadership, and vibrant youth culture. To bridge this gap, our project, Pondok Bahasa, produces cinematic, curriculum-aligned lessons filmed in Indonesia. These resources model real communication, present diverse voices, and align with the Australian Curriculum, helping students connect linguistic structure with cultural authenticity.
Our recommendation is clear: make the renewal of Asian-language resources a national priority. Invest in materials that support teachers’ confidence and sustain student engagement through the middle years. Doing so will not only improve continuity in Indonesian but strengthen the long-term supply of teachers and graduates who can deepen Australia’s regional literacy.
A Shared Investment
Australia’s Asia capability will be defined not by policy ambition alone but also by what happens in classrooms — by whether teachers have the tools to inspire curiosity and confidence, and whether students feel a sense of connection to the region they are learning about.
As the inquiry considers its findings, it should recognise that the most effective reforms often begin with small, practical shifts. Renewing classroom resources, investing in teacher capability, and building continuity through the middle years may not make headlines, but they are the quiet foundations on which deeper regional understanding depends.
Andrew Catton is an Educational Content Specialist at Pondok Bahasa and a registered Indonesian, English, and Humanities teacher.
This article is published under a Creative Commons license and may be republished with attribution.
