Ian G. Malcolm

'But it was all a Bit Confusing …': Comprehending Aboriginal English Texts

The study reported in this paper explored the schemas that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal educators bring to the task of comprehending oral narratives produced by Aboriginal children. During each data collection session, a participant listened to a series of eight passages and tried to recall each passage immediately after listening. The participants had a chance to listen to each narrative twice and produce two recalls of each passage. The participants were also given a chance to read a transcript of each passage and to make comments on their experience after the recall process. The data were then analysed in three stages. The first stage involved the analysis of recall protocols for the idea units out of which they were composed. This was carried out to explore the content schemas that were employed by the participants in comprehending the original narratives. The second stage was a comparison of formal schemas that appeared to inform the original narratives and the recall protocols. Finally, the recalls by Aboriginal participants were examined for any general patterns or strategies recruited during the recall. The results overall showed a continuum of familiarity on the part of participants with the schemas that appeared to underlie the narratives.

The habitat of Australia's aboriginal languages : past, present and future

The book looks at Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders and explores the changing habitat of languages from pre-colonial times to the present. The contributions treat the languages from a structural and functional linguistic perspective, move on to the issue of cultural maintenance and then turn to language policy, planning and the educational and legal dimensions.

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue: Australian Aboriginal Students' Schematic Repertoire

Learning a second dialect entails learning new schemas, and in some cases learning a whole new set of language schemas as well as cultural schemas. Most Australian Aboriginal children live in a bicultural and bidialectal context. They are exposed, to a greater or lesser extent, to the discourse of Australian English and internalise some of its schemas. This may occur in diverse contexts, not only the context of the school. However, Western-based schooling by its nature generally expects students to operate exclusively according to the schemas that underlie the ‘standard’ dialect. An analysis of the discourse of bidialectal Aboriginal children in the South-west of Australia suggests that it exhibits the use of schemas from Aboriginal English (‘something old’), Australian English (‘something new’) as well as parodic uses of Australian English schemas (‘something borrowed’) and schematic blends which may sometimes be dysfunctional (‘something blue’). In this paper, discourse illustrating each of these schema types will be exemplified and discussed in terms of its implications for our understanding of second dialect acquisition and the literacy education of Aboriginal children.

Speech events of the Aboriginal classroom

The largest occupational group among Aboriginal Australians today consists of those engaged in schooling (Aboriginal Consultative Group, 1975: 5). It follows that sociolinguistic research relevant to the contemporary experience and needs of Aborigines needs to focus on this cross-cultural setting, as well as on more traditional settings of Aboriginal life. The title of this paper is perhaps selfcontradictory. With rare exceptions, it would seem, there are no Aboriginal classrooms. The Aboriginal classroom, as discussed in this paper, is the classroom of the European-dominated education system, when Aborigines are present in it. Sociolinguistic research reveals that it is not the same as the classroom of the European-dominated education system where Aboriginal pupils are not present (Malcolm, 1979a). It is the intention of this paper to present a system for the description of the classroom in sociolinguistic terms, to show some of the distinctive features of the Aboriginal classroom, and to offer some suggestions as to how they may be accounted for. Classrooms lend themselves to sociolinguistic investigation because they are associated with social occasions involving speech behaviors (Gumperz, 1968). The relation of speech behavior to social occasion is less predictable in some social occasions than in others (Fillmore, 1973: 279-280). Where the behaviors of participants are, to a large extent, governed by rules for the use of speech, social occasions may be termed speech events (Hymes, 1972,1977). A number of factors in the linguistic ecology of the classroom predispose it toward routinized communication: the behavior which takes place there is largely task-oriented; the tasks are performed and controlled by means of discourse; they are predictable and recurrent. This is, then, a situation in which the sociolinguistic structuring may be fairly readily identifiable (Hymes, 1977: 38-39) and may therefore be considered appropriate for investigation in terms of speech events. Speech events, then, are here understood to be social occasions, or segments of social occasions, in which the behaviors of the participants are largely governed by rules for the use of speech. It is assumed that speech events are related to both the higher-level sociolinguistic structuring of a society (speech

Issues in English Language Assessment of Indigenous Australians

Although English is widely used by Indigenous Australians as the main means of communication, national testing has consistently raised questions as to the level of their English language and literacy achievement. This article examines contextual factors (historical, linguistic, cultural, socio-political and educational) which underlie this situation and calls for a more context-sensitive approach to the English language assessment of Indigenous Australians.

Aboriginal English Research: An Overview

Abstract A range of varieties of English have been developed for communication within or across Australian Aboriginal communities which are collectively known as Aboriginal English. This designation is normally not used to include pidgins or creoles, although pidgins and creoles have, in the past, played a role in the development of Aboriginal English. Research into varieties of Aboriginal English began in the 1960s with a succession of studies of the informal speech of small groups in a number of Queensland communities. Descriptive accounts have now been made of varieties from all states of Australia and from the Northern Territory. Most varieties have many features in common, but the influence of pidgin/creole and of Aboriginal vernaculars is stronger in some locations than in others. Areas of interest in Aboriginal English research include issues of code choice and switching, speech use, discourse, oral narrative, the historical development of the dialect, semantics and lexicography. The role of Aboriginal researchers in research into Aboriginal English has been small but is growing, especially with recent trends towards applied and action research.

Observations on variability in the verb phrase in aboriginal English

Abstract Most existing studies of Aboriginal English have been based on data gathered from individuals or small groups of speakers at a single point in time and/or without reference to considerations of language development. This paper addresses a need, for purposes of language planning in education, for more information on English language development in bidialectal Aboriginal children in the primary school years. It focuses on aspects of the verb phrase (known to be particularly salient in distinguishing non‐standard varieties from standard English) in seven bidialectal Aboriginal children from a remote Western Australian primary school. The children range in age from five to ten years and their speech was regularly recorded over twelve months. The findings show evidence of the maintenance and development of both dialects and suggest that their speakers have different educational needs from those of children whose first language is either standard English or a language other than English.

Terms of Adoption: Cultural Conceptual Factors Underlying the Adoption of English for Aboriginal Communication

Indigenous Australians have, for the most part, come to use English to express their cultural identity. Cultural Linguistics provides a means of tracing the ways in which the language has been modified to make this possible. In this overview, some of the distinctive categories, schemas, metaphors and metonymies of Aboriginal English are described. In order to bring about this different variety of English, processes of retention, elimination, modification and extension of the input varieties needed to take place. Evidence of such processes is provided. It is argued that a number of underlying cultural conceptual imperatives were the conceptual drivers of the changes that needed to take place for English to be adopted for use by Indigenous speakers as a nativised dialect. Group orientation, interconnectedness, orientation to motion, orientation to observation and awareness of the transcendent are put forward as five such imperatives. Such Cultural Linguistic evidence supports the view that Aboriginal English is a parallel development to rather than a variety of Australian English.

A day in the park: Emerging genre for readers of Aboriginal English

Despite the fact that varieties of Aboriginal English are widely used in communication in Aboriginal communities across Australia, the use of Aboriginal English in writing has been limited. A significant genre for Aboriginal writers has been the autobiographical narrative. In most published narratives of this genre, Aboriginal English has not been widely used. This paper describes and discusses an autobiographical narrative composed by Aboriginal author Glenys Collard and published by the Western Australian Department of Training and Workforce Development in 2011 in which the only medium of narration (except for utterances by non-Aboriginal characters) is Aboriginal English. Analysis of this text supports the view that Aboriginal English as depicted in metropolitan Perth exhibits significant linguistic and stylistic continuity with Aboriginal discourse in more remote settings. It is suggested that writing for Aboriginal English readership entails the emergence of a distinctive genre.

Children's language and multilingualism: indigenous language use at home and school

This book is an outcome of the Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition Project, funded by the Australian Research Council. It brings together academics and doctoral students focusing on the study of Central Australian languages, language acquisition and processes of language shift, maintenance and change, and it supplements their insights with input from linguists working in education and speech pathology in Western Australia and the Northern Territory. As such, the book is a unique blend of findings from recent fieldwork with their implications for education and language change. In her foreword, Shirley Brice Heath highlights the book’s focus on processes of co-participation in language socialisation and on the ways in which it provides insights into ‘what must go on in the heads of individual learners’ (ix). The editors then introduce the volume with reference to the ‘language landscapes’ surrounding indigenous children and the ways in which they bear upon the work of teachers, speech pathologists and others. They describe the four-year study of child language development in Kalkaringi, Tennant Creek, Yakanarra and Lajumanu which informs a large part of the book, going on to indicate how the children in these communities are learning language from an input that variously involves basilectal and acrolectal Kriol, Wumpurrarni English, Warumungu (in Tennant Creek), Gurindji (in Kalkaringi) and Walmajarri (in Yakanarra). The book presents a series of case studies in four sections. The first is concerned with early language development and use at home. Moses and Yallop focus on the use of questions by caregivers in the Walmajarri/Kriol-speaking context of Yakanarra, observing that questions including display questions are not uncommon in home interactions between preschoolers and caregivers, and that about two-thirds of questions directed to children are answered by them. The fact that children are reluctant to respond to questioning by teachers is seen by the authors to be less related to their upbringing than to the fact that schools use standard English and expect individuals to answer before their peers. Disbray discusses story-telling sessions with twoand three-year-olds in Tennant Creek, and notes two styles: collaborative and elaborate narration, always involving some code-mixing in the Wumpurrarni English narrative. Eickelkamp provides a detailed discussion of the use of ‘sand stories’ (where girls draw in the sand while engaging in lengthy narration) at Ernabella. She sees such story-telling as ‘an integral part of imagining the self with joy as a grown up’ (93). The second section contains three papers on language and learning in the classroom context. Readers look at traditional teaching interactions among the Yolngu, which naturally occur in small groups in the bush. Talk may be addressed to the whole group, ‘the responsibility for answering is dispersed among the group’ (119), and it is normal for participants to ‘wander in and out of conversations without a closing comment’ (107). In this context, children frequently ask questions, and usually receive answers. Readers see these Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 2010, 1 3, iFirst article