Endangered Languages and Cultures

Contact..

5 February 20114 March 2010 by Jane Simpson

.. is showing TONIGHT on ABC television 9.25 pm. It describes how in the 1960s Martu people of the Western Desert of Australia first encountered non-Indigenous Australians. It’s based on the book Cleared out by Sue Davenport, Peter Johnson and Yuwali, who appears in the film. Yuwali has lived through contact, missions, remote settlements, Native … Read more

“Let us love native language and make it lovely” – International Mother Language Day – 21 February

5 February 201121 February 2010 by Jane Simpson

Today is UNESCO’s International Mother Language Day (IMLD) which is intended to “promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism”. The UN have just launched UN Language Days, “a new initiative which seeks to celebrate multilingualism and cultural diversity as well as to promote equal use of all six of its official working languages throughout the … Read more

Fishing

5 February 201118 February 2010 by Jane Simpson

For a beautifully organised site run by a small group, check out Sarah Colley‘s new site: the Sydney fish project. What fish have been found in archaeological sites in Sydney? What do the bits look like, what does the whole fish look like (i.e. a reference skeleton)? What fish did Aborigines eat at what period? … Read more

Random locations of grammars and dictionaries

5 February 201117 February 2010 by Nick Thieberger

Further to the discussion of making online material discoverable (using standard metadata or via a more elaborate infrastructure proposed by ELIIP), other useful sources of free online grammars or dictionaries include ‘Online Books’ and the Project Gutenberg sites. These are ‘free’ as in unencumbered by intellectual property or copyright concerns, typically because the authors have been dead for over 50 years, not because they were placed in an open access archive. A sample of the files available follows, but wouldn’t it be great to have a way of announcing these items using standard metadata terms so they could all be searched via a dedicated language service? For example, the entry for Sgau Karen below is followed by Sgaw Karen, so google searching on Sgaw will only give you one of these three items.

Bypassing written documentation – oral annotation of recorded text

5 February 201115 February 2010 by Nick Thieberger

A large corpus of recorded oral tradition can be created using two recording machines, one playing back the spoken texts and the other used to capture an oral annotation. Recording speakers who are commenting on earlier recordings is a method for providing annotations that bypasses literacy.

Speaking Gamilaraay

5 February 201112 February 2010 by Jane Simpson

Sydney University students – your chance to study an Indigenous Australian language this semester! KOCR2605 – Speaking Gamilaraay 1 – University of Sydney Gamilaraay is an Indigenous Australian language from the mid-northwest of NSW that is currently undergoing revitalisation. This unit of study will provide students with a basic competence in speaking, understanding, reading and … Read more

Revisiting the bilingual education figures

5 February 201110 February 2010 by Jane Simpson

In Australia, there’s been a lot of downplaying recently of the fact that young kids understand what’s happening in the classroom better if they hear it in their first language – from the NAPLAN tests which don’t factor this in, to the MySchool comparisons which ignore it, to the English literacy push expressed recently by … Read more

Literacy isn’t just literacy in English

5 February 20119 February 2010 by Jane Simpson

On Ockham’s Razor (24/1/2010) a psychologist, Margot Prior, talks about the need to do something about Indigenous children’s literacy. There’s some good stuff in it – the need for more Indigenous teachers, for partnerships between schools and communities, for teachers to be sensitive to the differences between non-standard English and Standard English (note that this is NOT limited to Indigenous children – there are plenty of other children in Australia who don’t speak Standard English as a home language).
Prior’s overall solution?

If preschool education at a minimum of 15 hours per week was universally available, and every child had at least a year of programs which focused on enhancing language and pre-literacy skills, provided by committed preschool teachers, many more children would begin school well prepared for reading and writing.

I expect politicians will welcome this solution. Why should we treat it with caution?
First, for Prior “language” = “English”. But her talk shows some basic misunderstandings of languages and how children learn languages and reading and writing. The distinction between speaking a traditional language and speaking a non-standard variety of English are treated as if they presented the same difficulties for children attempting to learn standard English. They present rather different challenges – the methods of teaching English as a second language have to be different from those of teaching English as a second dialect.
As worrying are remarks such as the following:

Boa Sr

5 February 20115 February 2010 by Jane Simpson

Boa Sr was apparently the last speaker of the Great Andamanese language Bo (or Aka-Bo, described as extinct in the Ethnologue). According to Survival International there were around 5000 Great Andamanese in 1858 , when the British invaded the Andaman Islands. Now there are around 50 – killings, diseases and forcible resettlement having caused the … Read more

Give us more numbers

5 February 20111 February 2010 by Jane Simpson

Check out Nicolas Rothwell’s article in Saturday’s Australian. It’s about yes well maybe after all it wasn’t such a good idea the way the Intervention demoralised Indigenous people and engendered a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of Government and its bureaucrats. So, which newspaper has hammered Indigenous people for incompetence and dysfunctionality over the last 4 years? Which newspaper has been applauding itself for triggering the Intervention?
And thinking of other misusable data, the My School Site was launched recently, showing how students across Australia performed on the NAPLAN tests of English literacy and numeracy.
I’m all for numbers, but I do share Bruce Petty’s concern about how these are being used. The numbers we’ve been given are seriously flawed for understanding what’s happening in Indigenous schools in the NT.
These are ENGLISH literacy tests administered in ENGLISH. So if the kids start monolingual in a language other than English it’s kinda obvious that they’re going to do badly in reading and writing English in their first years at school. And they’ll continue to do badly if they don’t get good ESL teaching and if they get so bored at school that they stop attending.
Lots of the remote NT schools (bilingual and non-bilingual) do really badly. What is unforgiveable is the comparison with so-called “statistically similar” schools. They do not seem to have factored in first language. So, among the schools compared to Yuendumu (majority of children speak Warlpiri as a first language) are schools where most children’s first language is English, Aboriginal English or an English-based creole. Here are some (there are probably more but I don’t know all the communities).
Borroloola School, Borroloola NT 0854
Camooweal State School, Camooweal QLD 4828
Goodooga Central School, Goodooga NSW 2831
Moree East Public School, Moree NSW 2400
Wilcannia Central School, Wilcannia NSW 2836
Even if you speak an English-based creole rather than standard English, you’ll still do better than a child who only speaks a traditional language – just as English-speaking children find it easier to learn French than Chinese. There are so many similar words.
Who could be surprised that these children do better on English tests?
And, the information one really wants isn’t there on the site. You can get mission statement blah. So the Feds have said they’ll give more information – what parents think about schools…. Brilliant, what blame-avoiding PR person thought that up?
I bet parents would be MORE interested in the following sets of numbers, which the State and Federal Departments could provide MUCH more cheaply than by conducting an expensive survey of parents:

How much do the State and Federal governments spend per child in the school?
how many students per teacher?(see a nice opinion piece (1/2/2010) in the Sydney Morning Herald)
how many first year out teachers are there in the school?
what’s the teacher churn in the school?
in schools with high numbers of children who don’t speak English, how many properly trained ESL teachers are there? (and I don’t mean ESL training via a day’s workshop with a department trainer)
how long has the principal been there>

Throw those into the statistical blender and see how that changes the “statistically similar schools” clumping.
Apparently the Federal Minister for Education, Julia Gillard, wants us to use the My School website to ‘hold schools and teachers to account’. Give us the numbers ON THAT SITE so we can hold Governments to account.
On the other hand, take the much maligned bilingual education programs. Last year the NT government demoralised communities with bilingual education programs by unilaterally abolishing those programs, against the communities’ wishes. All in the name of improving NAPLAN scores.