The Diplomat
The director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, signed an agreement past friday with the RMIT University (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University) that will allow the institution to have its second office in Australia, after the centre in Sydney.
García Montero traveled to Australia to sign this agreement of mutual cooperation with RMIT in activities of promotion of the Spanish language and dissemination of Spanish-speaking culture. The signing ceremony was also attended by the Vice Chancellor for Internationalization and Collaboration of the University, Saskia Loer Hansen, and was attended, among others, by the Spanish Ambassador to Australia, Alicia Moral Revilla; the Consul General of Spain in Melbourne, Sergio Krsnisk, and senior officials of the educational administration of the Australian Government.
Melbourne, capital of the state of Victoria, in southeastern Australia, is the second most populated city in the country, with more than five million inhabitants, and the most dynamic and cosmopolitan city. The signed agreement includes multiple academic projects in which RMIT University, with campuses in Melbourne, Vietnam and Barcelona, and the Instituto Cervantes, which is present in more than ninety cities on five continents, will be able to collaborate. RMIT, a global university of Technology, Design and Enterprise established in 1887, is known for its global excellence in Higher Education and Applied Research and has some of the most technologically advanced facilities in the world on its campuses.
Thanks to this agreement, Instituto Cervantes will begin to operate for the first time in Melbourne on a face-to-face basis. Within this framework, the Institute will offer a program of Spanish classes to be taught on the premises of RMIT and will participate in specific programs to teach Spanish to RMIT students who will be studying in Spanish-speaking countries. In addition, the higher education center will disseminate the online teaching materials that the Instituto Cervantes offers through the Aula Virtual de Español (AVE) and will promote the exams for the DELE and SIELE, with the aim of making RMIT University a future examination center for both types of diplomas in Spanish as a foreign language.
The two entities will also collaborate in the promotion of international agreements for the mobility of students, teachers and researchers, as well as in talent attraction programs. The Instituto Cervantes will also have its own space in the University’s library and will be able to use other facilities for its administrative operations. Among other cultural projects of common interest, both parties will work together in the promotion of science to strengthen the links between Australia and Spain in the field of research.
Spanish in Australia
García Montero’s working trip to Australia began on Thursday at the Instituto Cervantes center in Sydney, which the then King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia inaugurated in June 2009. Spanish is one of the most studied languages in Australia. At the end of 2021, there were 35,300 students of Spanish in primary education and 17,400 in secondary education. In the last five years, the number of students has grown by more than 51%. The growth of Spanish in the state of Victoria and specifically in Melbourne, in addition to Sydney, is particularly noteworthy. The Australian academic curriculum includes Spanish as a language of study along with twelve other languages (including Aboriginal and sign languages).
Spanish is also one of the ten most studied languages in the Australian education system. Sixty-seven percent of its teaching is concentrated in primary school. Secondary and Higher Secondary Education account for 33% of Spanish language teaching in Australia. In the last five years there has been an increase of 61 % of students in secondary education and 27 % in high school, while the number of students of other European languages has been decreasing or stagnating. In higher education, 21 out of 43 universities teach Spanish at different levels. Only a small percentage of students choose to study a foreign language and there is a general decline in interest in languages at universities.
The state of Victoria has the largest number of Spanish language students in primary education, with 19,500 students (more than half of the total), and the third largest number of Spanish language students in secondary education, with 3,500 students. It is the state with the greatest increase in the number of Spanish students. In addition, six of its 10 universities offer Spanish classes.
