The future of Greek language learning has been one of the key issues that has significantly concerned the Greek community, because although important initiatives have taken place over the years, we still deal with the challenges today. Due to my mother’s migration trajectory and my young cousins’ experiences around Greek language acquisition, the issue of Greek language learning and teaching began to concern me personally two years ago. In fact, it concerned me to the extent that during that period, I decided to design and develop an educational initiative entitled ‘Melbourne – Athens: A Journey of Friendship’, which was successfully implemented for two years.

Occasioned by the imminent Conference ‘Connecting and Interconnecting Communities and Landscapes: Reclaiming Greece as a field of Studies, Teaching and Research in the 21st Century’ at Macquarie University in December and my recent discussion with Dr Stavroula Nikoloudis of the Greek studies Department of Languages and Linguistics at La Trobe University on the future of Greek language learning, this article aims at encouraging the dialogue and mobilising the community of teachers for more effective initiatives.

Greek language learning and its challenges
Greek language learning and effective pedagogical interventions remain a very complex issue. To efficiently support an educational initiative, one must have knowledge around the Greek language learning environment and address the individual factors that affect Greek language learning – i.e. students’ and parents’ attitudes towards Greek language learning, as well as the language policy of both the Victorian and Greek state.

The ‘Melbourne – Athens: A Journey of Friendship’ educational initiative focused exclusively on the factors that relate to students’ attitudes concerning Greek learning by addressing students’ needs in a very contemporary way.

Nowadays, the students who attend after-school Greek language programs are mostly third generation immigrants – this means that the majority of these students grow up with parents who were born and raised in Australia. In many cases, they grow up in intermarriage environments. Therefore, Greek is not the main language spoken at home. Most students who attend after-school Greek language programs learn Greek because they wish to communicate and engage effectively with their grandparents (yiayia and pappou). The opportunities for these students to speak Greek with peers are extremely limited and may arise only if they participate in a student exchange program, or travel to Greece.

Students’ disengagement for Greek language learning becomes more apparent, when their responsibilities and obligations to their mainstream school increase.

It has been observed that when students’ obligations increase, they often drop out from attending after-school Greek language programs (usually during Year 10) or it pushes them to classify Greek language learning as a second priority.

‘Melbourne – Athens: A Journey of Friendship’ program
Within this framework I designed the ‘Melbourne – Athens: A Journey of Friendship’ program that was implemented from 2016 to 2018 with the Hellenic American Educational Foundation (Psychico College) and the Greek Community of Melbourne’s Language and Culture Schools (Balwyn Campus & Doncaster) and Alphington Grammar. The aim of the program was to facilitate the needs of the Greek language schools’ students in oral communication and foster intercultural awareness and skills for all students, because although they share Greek heritage, they have grown up in different countries.

At its core, the program is established on the technology, one-on-one peer mentoring, and distance learning triptych for acquiring the Greek language. Year 10 students of the Hellenic American Educational Foundation (Psychico College) play the mentors and Year 9 students of the GCM’s Language and Culture Schools are the program’s mentees. On the basis of its design, mentors and mentees meet online (via Skype) once a week, for 40 minutes to communicate in Greek. Their Skype sessions, which are semi-structured, are based on specially designed educational material.

Distance Learning Mentoring: An innovation
The program may be characterised as highly innovative. Its innovative character is not attributed to its technological or distance learning dimension, as distance learning ceased to be an innovative intervention long ago. One will find hundreds of distance learning programs for Greek language learning on the internet.
The program’s innovative element lies in the creation and development of a distance, peer-mentoring relationship for the purposes of Greek language learning, since distance learning programs for language purposes foresee an adult as the trainer and an adolescent (or adolescents) as the trainee. At the same time, mentoring programs (otherwise known as buddying programs) presuppose that students share the same physical space and school environment, because these programs were founded to a) reduce bullying, b) improve students’ outcomes and c) manage students’ transitions.

Distance Learning Mentoring: Challenges and educational interventions
However, the establishment and development of a distance, peer-mentoring relationship for the purposes of Greek language learning was one of the program’s biggest challenges. Those of us who have worked with teenagers know that young people are very self-conscious and often socially reserved. In this case, the students’ self-consciousness was more intense because they were going to meet for the first time via technology, and throughout the program, Skype was mediating their relationship. I remember a student telling me: “Miss I think that this will be a very confronting experience.”

Many of the program’s mentees also felt uncomfortable with the idea that they were going to communicate exclusively in the Greek language with their mentor for about 40 minutes and had concerns about their accent, possible grammatical mistakes, the pace of their speech, etc. Mentors were also stressed and had concerns about their role, since they were not education professionals.

In order to deliver the program in a less confronting way, informative meetings with the students and parents of the GCM’s Language and Culture Schools were organised to allow the program’s youth to express their concerns. A ‘Train the Mentors’ initiative was also designed to prepare mentors for their role. At the same time, to avoid the awkwardness of students’ one-on-one meetings, a group kick-off Skype meeting was organised to break the ice. During that meeting, students were able to introduce themselves, but also speak with the program’s teachers and school principals. Adding to this, the program’s educational material was exclusively designed to suit students’ needs, since it had very clear instructions and covered topics that promoted intercultural awareness – i.e. students interests about both countries. Finally, the program foresaw weekly feedback discussions with students to listen to their ‘voices’, so that the program’s content would adapt accordingly.

Unquestionably, designing and implementing such a program was a very demanding procedure. However, when I was going through the program’s feedback I realised that the program’s students had understood the dynamic evolution and changes of the Greek language. It is indicative that many of them commented on their peers’ use of Greek and often observed that it was different to that of their grandparents. At the same time, I understood that via the Program the students had felt more connected to Greece, since the Skype sessions provided opportunities to recall memories from Greece, to discuss their visits to the country, or refer to their grandparents’ birth place while engaging with their mentee. Undoubtedly, the mentoring peer relationship was the catalyst, since it liberated mentees who felt that they could speak Greek relieved from the fear of ‘being marked for their performance’. This empowering relationship was expressed in the words of one of the program’s students who told me in one of our feedback sessions: “Miss, when I speak with my mentor, I feel that I know how to speak Greek!”

Going back to our introduction and our key concern related to Greek language learning and its future, I believe that nowadays it is important to introduce more innovative and well designed interventions with the participation of students and teachers for better and more optimistic outcomes. In parallel, it is important to exchange good practices and opinions. The conference Connecting and Interconnecting Communities and Landscapes: Reclaiming Greece as a field of Studies, Teaching and Research in the 21st Century is a good opportunity to continue and enrich the dialogue.

Maria, responsible for the Program’s design and coordination.

For more on the Conference visit: https://events.mq.edu.au/2018-Greek-Studies