Samantha Disbray

Spaces for learning: policy and practice for indigenous languages in a remote context

abstract Bilingual and Indigenous language and culture programmes have run in remote Australian schools with significant and continuing local support. Developments such as the new national Indigenous languages curriculum offer a further opportunity to broaden and sustain Indigenous language teaching and learning activities in these schools. However, over the last two decades, increasing government attention to poor outcomes on national standardised literacy and numeracy assessments has markedly restricted the scope for Indigenous languages. This paper draws on a model of ideological and implementational spaces to discuss competing discourses in top-down and bottom-up policy. Data from an ethnographic study on education stakeholders in remote locations in Australias Northern Territory revealed incongruities between local discourses that emphasise bi- and multilingualism, local identity and knowledge and community language maintenance and institutional discourses, which foreground a uniform model of education, with English literacy the dominant measure of educational success. The study also revealed that principals, teachers, and community members in some schools work together to develop vibrant, though often fragile, programmes. In addition to this, community members outside school systems are increasingly finding and taking up the spaces that allow innovative Indigenous language and cultural teaching and learning.

History of Bilingual Education in the Northern Territory

This book provides the first detailed history of the Bilingual Education Program in the Northern Territory of Australia. This ambitious and innovative program began in 1973 and at different times it operated in English and 19 Aboriginal languages in 29 very remote schools. The book draws together the grassroots perspectives of Indigenous and non-Indigenous practitioners and researchers. Each chapter is based on rich practitioner experience, capturing bottom-up aspirations, achievements and reflections on this innovative, yet largely undocumented language and education program. The volume also makes use of a significant collection of ‘grey literature’ documents to trace the history of the program. An ethnographic approach has been used to integrate practitioner accounts into the contexts of broader social and political forces, education policy decisions and on-the-ground actions. Language in education policy is viewed at multiple, intersecting levels: from the interactions of individuals, communities of practice and bureaucracy, to national and global forces. The book offers valuable insights as it examines in detail the policy settings that helped and hindered bilingual education in the context of minority language rights in Australia and elsewhere.

Child-caregiver interaction in two remote Indigenous Australian communities

This paper reports on a study in two remote multilingual Indigenous Australian communities: Yakanarra in the Kimberley region of Western Australia and Tennant Creek in the Barkly region of the Northern Territory. In both communities, processes of language shift are underway from a traditional language (Walmajarri and Warumungu, respectively) to a local creole variety (Fitzroy Valley Kriol and Wumpurrarni English, respectively). The study focuses on language input from primary caregivers to a group of preschool children, and on the childrens productive language. The study further highlights child-caregiver interactions as a site of importance in understanding the broader processes of language shift. We use longitudinal data from two time-points, approximately 2 years apart, to explore changes in adult input over time and developmental patterns in the childrens speech. At both time points, the local creole varieties are the preferred codes of communication for the dyads in this study, although there is some use of the traditional language in both communities. Results show that for measures of turn length (MLT), there are notable differences between the two communities for both the focus children and their caregivers. In Tennant Creek, children and caregivers use longer turns at Time 2, while in Yakanarra the picture is more variable. The two communities also show differing trends in terms of conversational load (MLT ratio). For measures of morphosyntactic complexity (MLU), children and caregivers in Tennant Creek use more complex utterances at Time 2, while caregivers in Yakanarra show less complexity in their language at that time point. The studys findings contribute to providing a more detailed picture of the multilingual practices at Yakanarra and Tennant Creek, with implications for understanding broader processes of language shift. They also elucidate how childrens language and linguistic input varies diachronically across time. As such, we contribute to understandings of normative language development for non-Western, non middle-class children in multilingual contexts.

‘Red Dirt’ Schools and Pathways into Higher Education

Since 2011 the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation’s (CRC-REP) Remote Education Systems (RES) project has investigated aspects of remote schooling with a view to uncovering ways that outcomes for remote students and their families could be improved. One of the key questions driving the research was ‘what is education for in remote communities?’ The bulk of responses from remote Aboriginal respondents discussed the need for education to maintain language and culture, and build strong identities in young people. Very few respondents suggested that school was a stepping stone on a pathway to higher education. The question remains then, ‘what kinds of pathways would enable remote learners to progress to university and then to succeed?’ The answers we provide to this question are in part drawn from the RES research findings. But we also propose responses that are built on principles that emerge from the project. We look forward to consider how remote education systems could respond to give young people with aspirations for higher education the opportunities they need to succeed. The answers we provide recognise the complexity of the context. In particular, we provide a critique of boarding school strategies and suggest – in line with RES findings – strategies and approaches that are responsive to both the aspirations stated by community members for the future of the youth and the community.

A Thematic History of Bilingual Education in the Northern Territory

In 1950 Robert Menzies, then Prime Minister of Australia, was party to a little known, high-level agreement which acknowledged that in some circumstances a bilingual approach in education might be the best way to reach more traditionally oriented Aboriginal students in remote areas of the Northern Territory (NT) of Australia.

The Development of Reference Realization and Narrative in an Australian Contact Language, Wumpurrarni English

The development of narrative skill has been investigated extensively in a wide range of languages, cross-linguistically and in multilingual settings (Berman and Slobin, 1994b; Severing and Verhoeven, 2001; Hickmann, 2004; Strömqvist and Verhoeven, 2004). The present study investigates the development of reference realization in narrative among Indigenous children in a remote urban township in Central Australia. The children, aged between 5 and 14 years, are speakers of a contact language, Wumpurrarni English. Language development is rarely investigated among speakers of minority languages, whose language development is often appraised in the majority language, with little attention to language performance in the speakers home variety. The present study addresses this gap through a fine-grained qualitative analysis of the development of reference in narrative, drawing on a complex stimulus and a model of discourse strategy. The results show (a) a developmental trajectory similar to that found in other languages, with children aged eight and under producing simpler and less globally organized narratives than older speaker groups, and (b) vulnerability to the changing demands of the stimulus among these younger speakers. In addition, a subset of narrations were produced in “school variety,” a style more like Standard Australian English. The results for this set showed that the narrative content and global organization of the productions by 10- and 12-year-olds were more similar to the productions of younger children, than like-aged speakers, who narrated in their home variety. Analysis of speaker responses to two factors of complexity, the stimulus and code choice, illuminated mechanisms for discourse production and development, and suggest that constructing discourse requires co-ordination of an underlying schema and on-line construction of a particular story, through the deployment of linguistic devices in a particular narrative context. The analysis showed that these two skills are tightly interdependent, and indeed co-constructing.