Abstract
This chapter is the first longitudinal, quantitative study of the acquisition of Standard Australian English (SAE) as an additional dialect by Australian Aboriginal students in a classroom context in Queensland. The first language of the students has been described as a kind of creole or as a variety of Aboriginal English. Variation in six students’ use of SAE articles and demonstratives and related home language forms is examined in the classroom across different social and educational contexts over their first three years of schooling. There is no evidence that the students increased their rate of use of the SAE forms during the period of the study. The authors therefore argue that the mainstream, English literacy focused teaching method at that time and place did not support the SAE language learning needs of the students.
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Notes
- 1.
As the research was undertaken in 2010-2013, we quote the policy of the time. The current policy is very similar in substance.
- 2.
Most pre-service teacher training in Queensland currently does not include subjects on teaching English to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander EAL/D learners, with the exception of James Cook University, which includes a compulsory subject for Bachelor of Education students titled ‘Teaching English as a Second Language to Indigenous Students’ [which the first author has worked on as support staff for over the past four years]. Queensland University of Technology is adding a similar course to the core subjects of their Bachelor of Education degree in 2016. There has been in-service training at different levels available through the Language Perspectives team (see: http://indigenous.education.qld.gov.au/school/language-perspectives/Pages/default.aspx) for several years, but only recently has this become a departmental policy priority statewide, and continues to be intermittent and limited in reach. The EAL/D Hub will add to the self-guided in-service training available in this area when it is launched in 2018.
- 3.
The school is not named in accordance with our ethical clearance protocols.
- 4.
In Queensland, Prep is currently the first year of compulsory formal schooling, available to students aged four years and six months and above. This year is also referred to as ‘Foundation’ across Australia.
- 5.
Although all of these forms likely exist in the home variety of these students, not every use of these forms correlates with its probable syntactic and functional use in the home variety. Similarly, not all of the SAE target forms described above are consistently used in appropriate SAE syntactic frames. Like Dixon (Chap. 11, this volume), we assume that the students are using an interlanguage at times, or otherwise approximating SAE, but it is quite likely that that they are using their repertoires of language very differently outside the school context.
- 6.
Whether we should expect students learning English as an Additional Dialect to have command of these words by the age of seven or eight would depend on the dialect-learning factors mentioned above, including the amount of effective teaching. Even if we should not expect students to have reached this stage after four years of developmental language learning, the current system certainly does implicitly and explicitly expect these students to have full command of SAE, including determiners, as they are needed to succeed in NAPLAN, access the National Curriculum, and high English proficiency is described above as both State Schools’ policy and the stated goals for this school.
- 7.
We note that there was very little evidence of any active or explicit teaching of SAE articles and demonstratives in the recorded data, or of very much SAE language teaching at all, so the students may not actually have had a clear idea of what the ‘Target Dialect’ might be.
- 8.
- 9.
The documentation work of the D1 variety is incomplete, so we cannot say whether these uses are representative of that variety or an interlanguage used in the classroom.
- 10.
An alternate explanation is that these students are acquiring SAE articles and demonstratives, but choosing not to use them for reasons of identity and motivation. This is by far the more complicated explanation of the data, for two reasons: (1) There are contexts (i.e. literacy activities while addressing the teacher) where students do seem to be actively targeting SAE forms, or at least be aware that they are expected to perform in a particular way, yet they do not increase their rate of production of these forms over the three years. This would require that during these activities they have just enough non-SAE identity activated during these utterances to choose not to use the forms almost exactly one-third of the time, even while they are increasing their underlying representation of the forms incrementally over the three years. (2) The data used for this chapter is entirely based on the students’ productions in the classroom, so we are measuring their acquisition in terms of what they produce, attempting to avoid too heavy a reliance on explaining the state of grammatical systems in the mind, or extrapolating into identity-states. We don’t deny that these are significant factors in language use, but when we describe acquisition, it therefore must be in terms of what the student does produce, which naturally includes both their ability to accurately form the grammatical structures and pronunciation of the target variety and their social choices about when, where and how to use the new variety.
- 11.
This is very similar to testing phonology (th-initial vs. others) or looking at articles vs. demonstratives. Running models with these variables yield less significant results, although the explanation for why a/an is more likely to turn up as SAE must include both phonological and grammatical arguments.
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Fraser, H., Mushin, I., Meakins, F., Gardner, R. (2018). Dis, That and Da Other: Variation in Aboriginal Children’s Article and Demonstrative Use at School. In: Wigglesworth, G., Simpson, J., Vaughan, J. (eds) Language Practices of Indigenous Children and Youth. Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60120-9_10
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