Ellen Grote

Evidence of English language proficiency and academic achievement of non-English-speaking background students

The increasing number of international students enrolled in Australian universities over the last decade has met with a corresponding concern that many non-English-speaking background (NESB) students experience considerable difficulty in their courses. Consequently, concerns about admission procedures have been raised regarding how English language proficiency (ELP) is determined for NESB students (both domestic and international). In addition to standardised ELP tests, some universities accept other forms of evidence, such as the completion of English-medium courses. This large-scale quantitative study analysed data on 5675 undergraduate and postgraduate students available from one universitys database over a three-year period to ascertain if its ELP requirements were sufficient to ensure the academic progress of adequate numbers of these students. The best evidence for potential academic success was found to be standardised tests while students submitting other forms of ELP evidence tended to have more difficulties.

Challenging the Boundaries between School-sponsored and Vernacular Literacies: Urban Indigenous Teenage Girls Writing in an 'At Risk' Programme

Contemporary views of literacy as a wide range of sociocultural practices acknowledge a comprehensive account of adolescents’ literate lives, which includes previously unrecognised vernacular literacies. Contrasting descriptors such as official/unofficial and sanctioned/unsanctioned have been used to describe adolescent writing from different domains. While these distinctions are useful, the boundaries between them are subject to transgression. This paper draws on ethnographic data collected in a vocational education training programme for Year 10 students identified as being at educational risk. Adopting a communities of practice perspective, the study focuses on the school-sponsored writing practices of a group of Aboriginal English speaking girls. It describes how the girls recruited resources from communities of practice in which they participated outside the classroom. The findings indicate three ways in which the boundaries between school-sanctioned and vernacular literacy practices became disrupted, including: (1) the authorisation of unofficial practices; (2) the authorised and unauthorised infusion of unofficial content; and (3) the recruitment and acceptance of teen writing styles in school-sponsored tasks. It is argued that challenging the boundaries between official and vernacular literacies may be not only inevitable, but worthy of encouragement as a strategic way of promoting the participation of disaffected students in school-sponsored literacy activities.

A task-based needs analysis for Australian Aboriginal students: Going beyond the target situation to address cultural issues

Abstract While needs analyses underpin the design of second language analytic syllabi, the methodologies undertaken are rarely examined. This paper explores the value of multiple data sources and collection methods for developing a needs analysis model to enable vocational education and training teachers to address the needs of Australian Aboriginal students from remote communities who speak Australian English as an additional language (EAL). Adopting a task-based approach to needs analysis, data were gathered from educators, students, potential employers and Aboriginal community members using interviews, observation and document collection. The findings highlight the benefits of a needs analysis for triangulating multiple data sources and methods to identify the actual target tasks, including social workplace interactions as well as cultural issues. These findings have implications for all language needs analyses, particularly for EAL students from non-Western cultures.

Code-switching and Indigenous workplace learning: cross-cultural competence training or cultural assimilation?

For more than two decades, within numerous spheres of education, code-switching (CS)—moving competently between two languages or dialects—has been promoted as a useful, if not necessary, skill for Australian Indigenous students to develop. (The term ‘Indigenous’ in Australia usually refers to (mainland) Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Since the participants in our study were all Aboriginal, the terms ‘Indigenous’ and ‘Aboriginal’ are used interchangeably.) Linguistically it enables them to maintain communicative links with their home communities and to navigate non-Indigenous language environments. In schools and training organisations the development of CS often focuses on the verbal aspects of language (for example, ‘What does that mean in your English?’ or ‘How do we say that in Standard Australian English?’), but CS also encompasses the nonverbal. In this chapter we consider the cultural nuances that underpin the development of competent CS and its associated behaviours: what training organisations often refer to as ‘soft skills’. In doing so, we examine the vexed question of whether the development of these soft skills constitutes competency in cross-cultural communication or whether it is another guise for assimilation.

A second language task-based needs analysis for australian aboriginal learners: Accessing insider perspectives of the workplace and cultural domains

Syntactic priming in second language corpus data – testing an experimental paradigm in corpus data