Bridging Australian Indigenous language learner’s guides with SLA materials development frameworks

Abstract

The learner’s guide (LG) is a genre of pedagogical materials for Australian Indigenous languages, but LGs developed by field linguists are often questioned regarding their capacity to effectively facilitate language learning and, eventually, language revitalisation. This reflects a gap in the literature where applied linguistics perspectives are limited in Indigenous language studies, and vice versa. This study aims to address this gap by examining nine existing LGs published over the past four decades using a modified framework based on Tomlinson’s guidelines for second language acquisition (SLA) materials development. Findings show that the LGs are designed based on one of the three model types: (1) Type 1: non-communicative grammar-based, (2) Type 2: practice-integrated grammar-based, and (3) Type 3: text-driven meaning-based, among which the text-driven model has, theoretically speaking, the best potential to achieve pedagogical purposes. Yet, in general, existing LGs likely fail to equip learners with communicative competence. Other issues of greater complexity are also raised, including material comprehensibility and limited resources. A critical implication for the field is the necessity of empirical needs analyses for future LG development.

Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2021.1970179 .

Keywords:

• Second language acquisition
• Australian Indigenous languages
• learner’s guide
• material evaluation
• language revitalisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The ‘open-ended’ feature in Tomlinson (2010) is not included considering the common limitation of available resources for Indigenous language learning as discussed in Section 3.