Recognising the SAE language learning needs of Indigenous primary school students who speak contact languages

Abstract

Most Indigenous peoples live in urban and regional locations across Australia and no longer speak their traditional languages fluently. Instead contact languages, creoles and dialects, are widely spoken. In many educational settings, educators may know little about the first languages of the Indigenous children they teach, and not recognise these as different languages or dialects. Consequently, these students may not be treated as second language learners of Standard Australian English (SAE) and their language learning requirements are not considered. From a sociocultural perspective, language is crucial to students’ learning. In this paper, we quantitatively analyse the SAE learning needs of Indigenous primary school aged children in Far North Queensland using oral elicited imitation of simple sentences in SAE as a research method. Using one-way ANOVA, the results are compared with native monolingual SAE speakers showing significant differences between the two. This finding has important implications for classroom teaching practices and educational policies.

Keywords:

• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages
• contact languages
• English as an additional language or dialect (EAL/D)
• TESOL
• Standard Australian English (SAE)
• language differences
• Indigenous education
• primary schools
• elicited imitation

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted as part of a PhD at The University of Melbourne (Steele 2020), funded by the Australian Government Research Training Program (AGRTP) Scholarship and the Australia Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CE140100041). Our heartfelt thanks to the students who enthusiastically participated in this research and the schools and teachers who provided the opportunity. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their valuable feedback. Any errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The term “Indigenous” is used to respectfully refer to Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their languages.

2 The Australian Curriculum or “mainstream curriculum” should be differentiated to meet the learning needs of all students. In this case it should have been differentiated to meet the learning needs of students for whom English is an additional language or dialect, but was not.