Search

Speech corpora created primarily for linguistic research are not often easily repurposed for practical use by the communities who participated in the research. This chapter describes a process whereby methods and materials collected for language documentation research have been returned to speakers in communities; this involves the implementation of professional development activities for Warlpiri educators in bilingual education programs. Documentation of children’s speech took place in four Warlpiri communities in 2010. To make the research results available to educators in Warlpiri communities in an easily accessible way, the researcher produced short videos showing analyses of the children’s speech. These online videos, along with audio recordings and written transcripts of the children’s speech, were utilised by a team of linguists and educators at professional development workshops in the Northern Territory Department of Education. Educators actively worked with the materials, discussed issues relating to children’s oral language development, and identified potential pedagogical practices. Through this process the materials were returned to the Warlpiri community and utilised in an active cycle of locally focused professional learning activities.

In this chapter, we describe the development and use of the Warlpiri theme cycle, an Australian Indigenous language and culture curriculum, created by educators, elders and community members for four Warlpiri schools located in Central Australia. The Warlpiri curriculum is a three-year cycle, with 12 themes or knowledge domains, which are central to Warlpiri people and their land, language, law and culture. We present the theme cycle as the reflection and enactment of a living Indigenous Knowledge system in the teaching and learning programme in the Warlpiri schools. Processes of knowledge reproduction are examined. These processes are reflected in the ongoing development of the theme cycle and its knowledge domains, as well as in the pedagogies used in the Warlpiri programs.

The development of narrative skill has been investigated extensively in a wide range of languages, cross-linguistically and in multilingual settings (Berman & Slobin, 1994b; Hickmann, 2004; Severing & Verhoeven 2001, Strömqvist & Verhoeven, 2004). The present study investigates the development of reference realisation 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 speaker’s 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 organised 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, and the results for this set showed that the narrative content and global organisation of the productions by ten- and twelve–year-olds was more similar to the productions of younger children, than like-aged speakers narrating 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, and that these two skills are tig

Indigenous Australians have long been advocating for recognition of their languages, cultures and identities. They have sought the inclusion of their languages in schools to revitalize and maintain languages and cultural knowledge, and to take an activerole in the education of their children. This paper provides an overview of Indigenous language programs and activities in education and looks to future directions and innovations that may strengthen languages in education, and in turn Australian languages. The paper argues that policy and practice for Indigenous language education interacts with policy and discourse for Indigenous languages, education outcomes and Indigenous policy more broadly. It identifies strengths and challenges for Indigenous languages, and examines national legislative frameworks, which would support Australia’s languages into the future, a goal Australia has set itself.

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 children's 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 children's 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 study's 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 children's language and linguistic input varies diachronically across time. As such, we contribute to und