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Balancing the Languages in Māori-Medium Education in Aotearoa/New Zealand

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Minority Languages and Multilingual Education

Part of the book series: Educational Linguistics ((EDUL,volume 18))

Abstract

The chapter describes Māori medium education in New Zealand and in particular the changing role of Māori and English in these programs. The topic is approached through the perceptions and competences of the students. Little has previously been written about the perceptions and aspirations of Maori medium students in these programs. The focal learners are grade 8 students in three different Māori medium schools. The data were gathered by focus group interviews and literacy assessments. The analysis shows that students have positive attitudes towards Māori learning but they mostly use English in their out-of-school activities. Their skills in academic Māori are equally good in all three schools but their academic language skills in English vary across the schools. This chapter thus explores how the grade 8 students perceive their pathways, their languages and their future aspirations, in light of the above.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Statistics around Māori student populations are derived from school registers, which parents complete when enrolling their children at school.

  2. 2.

    The wider research project, conducted over the school year in 2007, was a multiple case study which explored how the three Māori-medium schools arranged their English transition programs, what issues they negotiated, and how well the students were progressing towards achieving high proficiency in te reo Māori and English as a result. The research participants included the English transition teachers, principals, Māori-medium teachers and a cohort of grade 8 students, the latter being the focus here.

  3. 3.

    School II had changed their English language policy earlier in the year to include the year 6 students. However, the grade 8 students interviewed for this project had only been exposed to 2 years English instruction.

  4. 4.

    A Level 3 partial immersion program offered between 30 and 50 % Māori instruction, below the internationally recognized threshold for effective bilingual instruction (see Lindholm-Leary 2001).

  5. 5.

    There are considerably fewer schools which offer Māori-medium education at the high school level and students often have to travel some distance to the closest school.

  6. 6.

    Hill assessed English reading and writing skills and Māori writing skills. He accessed the teachers’ most recent records to gauge the students’ Māori reading levels.

  7. 7.

    A running record, an assessment developed by Marie Clay, is a means of documenting a student’s individual reading of a continuous text. A running record can provide a way to assess an individual student’s reading, determine appropriate levels of text for reading, and to inform teaching. Taken at intervals, these records can show growth over time in reading skills.

  8. 8.

    The New Zealand Curriculum (New Zealand Ministry of Education 1993) provides guidelines for New Zealand schools teaching students from year 1 to year 13 (5–18 years). It divides student achievement into eight levels. This means that two school years approximate one curriculum level. This curriculum was superseded by a new curriculum in 2007 (New Zealand Ministry of Education 2007), and its Māori-medium equivalent in 2008 (New Zealand Ministry of Education 2008).

  9. 9.

    Ngā Kete Korero is a Māori language framework for identifying levels of language difficulty in junior primary/elementary reading texts.

  10. 10.

    The task of reading te reo Māori fluently is relatively easy to accomplish once learners have sound phonemic knowledge. As such, conducting assessments using fluency as a sole measure can cause results to be unreliable. It may have been the case that the students of School III were highly fluent readers of Māori, but their comprehension did not match this.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education, The University of Waikato, Waikato, Aotearoa/New Zealand

    Richard Hill

  2. Faculty of Education, The University of Auckland, Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand

    Stephen May

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  1. Richard Hill
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  2. Stephen May
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Correspondence to Richard Hill .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Theory & Hist. of Education, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU - IKERBASCQUE, Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain

    Durk Gorter

  2. Dept. of Philoogy & Language Teaching, Public University of Navarre Campus de Arrosadia, Irunea-Pamplona, Spain

    Victoria Zenotz

  3. Dept. of Research Methods in Education,, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain

    Jasone Cenoz

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Hill, R., May, S. (2014). Balancing the Languages in Māori-Medium Education in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In: Gorter, D., Zenotz, V., Cenoz, J. (eds) Minority Languages and Multilingual Education. Educational Linguistics, vol 18. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7317-2_10

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