Judith Rochecouste

Teaching Australian Aboriginal Higher Education Students: What Should Universities Do?.

This paper reports findings from a recent study of Australian Aboriginal higher education student experience. Reported here are extracts from a set of case studies of staff, specifically those working in Indigenous Centres, involved with these students in both teaching and support capacities. These participants provided a rich set of qualitative data regarding their own experiences in the learning and teaching of Australian Aboriginal students. The paper raises important issues for the improvement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander university student experience and for increasing their representation in higher education, a strategy strongly supported by several current government initiatives. Best practice in the context of this paper not only includes teaching and learning, which in turn has implications for raising the awareness of university teaching staff, but also applies more broadly at the level of university-wide responsibility including policy-making and future directions.

Communicative Competence in Oral Language Assessment

This paper reports on a review of the teaching and assessment of oral language in Western Australian secondary schools. Results show that teachers have considerable difficulty in incorporating oral language tasks into their pedagogy because of a curriculum biased towards developing writing skills. Teachers also revealed that they do not have the skills to assess oral language even though they acknowledge the importance of their students’ communicative competence both within the school environment and outside it. Students involved in the study were also aware of many weaknesses in their communicative competence and that these were not being addressed in the classroom.

Embracing plurality through oral language

The transmission and dissemination of knowledge in Aboriginal societies for the most part occurs orally in an Aboriginal language or in Aboriginal English. However, whilst support is given to speaking skills in Indigenous communities, in our education system less emphasis is given to developing equivalent oral communicative competence in Standard Australian English (SAE). Instead the focus is given to the ongoing assessment of reading and writing skills and grammatical knowledge – this is in direct contrast to the existing language experience of Aboriginal students. Therefore, for Aboriginal students to participate in mainstream society, we suggest that there is a need to nurture oral language skills in SAE and provide learners with the experience to develop their code-switching ability to maintain continuity with their first language or dialect. Drawing on previous research that we and others have undertaken at several schools, this paper highlights the need for three fundamental changes to take place within language education: (1) school policies to change and explicitly accept and support Aboriginal English in code-switching situations; (2) familiarity among school staff about the major differences between Aboriginal English and SAE; and (3) tasks that focus on developing and practising the ‘when, why and how’ of code-switching.

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.