{"id":3579,"date":"2007-06-05T15:22:13","date_gmt":"2007-06-05T15:22:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2007\/06\/wota-lota-%e2%80%93-gail-woods\/"},"modified":"2011-02-05T07:47:05","modified_gmt":"2011-02-05T07:47:05","slug":"wota-lota-%e2%80%93-gail-woods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2007\/06\/wota-lota-%e2%80%93-gail-woods\/","title":{"rendered":"WOTA LOTA \u2013 Gail Woods"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>[From Gail Woods, Lecturer, Centre for Australian Languages and Linguistics, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.batchelor.edu.au\/\">Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Education<\/a>, with respect to the <a href=\"\/blog\/2007\/05\/languages-in-crisis\/\">Languages in Crisis summit<\/a><\/em>]<br \/>\nWhilst the discussion paper is clearly focused on Languages Other Than Australian (LOTA) and the inherent security and economic risks associated with monolingualism,  its sentiments could\/should be subversively harnessed to develop the case for the maintenance of Australian languages.<br \/>\nFor example, the pertinent benefits relating to studying a second language such as the increased rate of literacy development (as opposed to the myth that maintaining Australian languages decreases the uptake of English); the consistently high performance levels achieved by European children (who study second and third languages) as opposed to Australian children, in comparative literacy and numeracy tests; and &#8220;the cognitive benefits such as divergent thinking processes and more efficient uses of brain functions&#8221; could be equally fed into a proposal to reinstate properly resourced bilingual programs in schools where students&#8217; first language is other than standard English.<br \/>\nThat the industries of tourism and international education rely on a notion that Australia is &#8220;a tolerant society that welcomes people from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds&#8221;, must be seen as laughable when we have demonstrated such a poor record of Indigenous language preservation and maintenance. Australian language and culture programs in schools are miserably underfunded, if in fact they operate at all.  They are then held up as failures, with the blame squarely placed on Indigenous communities. And when the dollars are tight they are the first to go.<br \/>\nCertainly, as stated in the discussion paper, schools should not be seen as a monolingual habitat and never was this more true than in remote community schools throughout Australia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[From Gail Woods, Lecturer, Centre for Australian Languages and Linguistics, Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Education, with respect to the Languages in Crisis summit] Whilst the discussion paper is clearly focused on Languages Other Than Australian (LOTA) and the inherent security and economic risks associated with monolingualism, its sentiments could\/should be subversively harnessed to develop the &#8230; <a title=\"WOTA LOTA \u2013 Gail Woods\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2007\/06\/wota-lota-%e2%80%93-gail-woods\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about WOTA LOTA \u2013 Gail Woods\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-indigenous-language-education"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3579"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4355,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3579\/revisions\/4355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}