{"id":3758,"date":"2008-11-12T08:06:07","date_gmt":"2008-11-12T08:06:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2008\/11\/local-and-national-action-for-australias-indigenous-languages\/"},"modified":"2011-02-05T07:46:50","modified_gmt":"2011-02-05T07:46:50","slug":"local-and-national-action-for-australias-indigenous-languages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2008\/11\/local-and-national-action-for-australias-indigenous-languages\/","title":{"rendered":"Local and national action for Australia’s Indigenous languages"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Update: in Crikey<\/a> 14\/11\/08 there’s a good story by Samanti de Silva from the Areyonga community NT, on the community’s concern about the decision to abandon bilingual education. It links to a letter signed by around 35 community members saying among other things:
\n“Learning in Pitjantjatjara first helps our children to learn better. It helps them to learn English too. Our children who are good at reading and writing in Pitjantjatjara are also the same ones who are good at reading and writing in English…. The teachers will use Pitjantjatjara when teaching to help the children understand things. How can you tell us the teachers must use only English even if the children don’t understand what they are saying?”<\/em>]
\nThe perilous situation of Australian Indigenous Languages has aroused some action. ‘Friends of Bilingual Education<\/strike> Learning’ [Thanks Wamut! I was back in FOB (education) support group mode – FOB tried to defend NT bilingual education in the early 1980s<\/em>] have a Google Group<\/a> for sharing information on the Northern Territory decision<\/a> to teach most of the day in English. It contains letters that people have written to the Minister, Marion Scrymgour, explaining the problems with this decision.
\nAction on this is urgently needed, before the bilingual education programs are silently dismantled over the summer holidays. Before the first hours of the first school day, when next year’s excited five-year olds realise they can’t understand what the teacher is saying.
\nOn the national level, the need for a National Indigenous Languages policy was discussed in Patrick McConvell’s Lingua Franca<\/a> talk last week. Ngapartji-Ngapartji <\/a> (see their policy paper here<\/a>) and FATSIL<\/a> (Federation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages)are campaigning for this, and the FATSIL website has an online petition to the Federal government. You can click here<\/a>, and see the petition, which can be printed out or signed online .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Update: in Crikey 14\/11\/08 there’s a good story by Samanti de Silva from the Areyonga community NT, on the community’s concern about the decision to abandon bilingual education. It links to a letter signed by around 35 community members saying among other things: “Learning in Pitjantjatjara first helps our children to learn better. It helps … 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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"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\/3758","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=3758"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4250,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3758\/revisions\/4250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}