[From John Giacon]
As noted in the blog post on John Hobson’s lecture, the Koori Centre has been one of a number of forces which have pioneered major developments in Indigenous Language education in NSW and other parts of Australia. I want to comment on two sentences in the review:
‘Indigenous children need qualified teachers who are fluent speakers of the language’ and ‘Majors in Indigenous languages just aren’t on offer [in Universities]’.
I will use my experience of Gamilaraay Yuwaalaraay to reflect on these. I started working in the languages 12 years ago. Sadly, I have not met anyone who has or had elementary fluency from ‘handed down’ language. For instance I have met a number of people who know that yanay is ‘go/walk’, but none who knew the past-tense form ‘yananhi‘ or the various continuous forms. Nor have I met anyone could productively use the locative suffix for meanings like ‘in, on, at’. Just two examples of the many elements you would need to know for even moderate fluency. People who have done courses now know these elements of Gamilaraay Yuwaalaraay, and much more. Fluency is growing, slowly.
So, the fluent teachers necessary for language teaching are not there, ‘in the community’. However the rules for forming past tense and the forms and meaning of the locative suffix, and much more, are in Corinne Williams’ Grammar of Yuwaalaraay (1980). And there is much more information that she did not have time to process in tapes and other Gamilaraay Yuwaalaraay sources. So if those sources are used, then resources and courses can be developed: for instance the Gamilaraay Yuwaalaraay Yuwaalayaay Dictionary, the ‘Speaking Gamilaraay‘ course at the Koori Centre/University of Sydney and the TAFE Certificate 1 in Gamilaraay and Gumbaynggirr courses.
Jane Simpson
FollowHow to discourage publication in languages other than English
So, the Oz Government wants to ensure that the Oz tax payer gets value for the taxes that pay for me and my colleagues to scuttle and scurry around universities, and our students to read & learn & think & write &..
To this praiseworthy end, each year the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Training ask us to produce copies of everything solid & worthy we’ve published over the previous year with all sorts of verification information, and of course the all important label MADE IN AN AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITY CONTAINING ALL AUSTRALIAN INGREDIENTS. And the “we” includes not only staff but also students – which is right & proper, except that the students get no direct benefit from the labor of copying and collating the information, whereas a small trickle of money comes back to departments on the basis of their research output.
Now, one of our students* has just published an interesting article on grammaticalisation of a Cantonese particle, in the Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Yue dialects (Cheung, H-H; S-H Cheung and H-K Chan (eds) 2007. Dishijie GuoYuefangyan Yantaohui Lunwunji (Beijing: China Social Sciences Press. ISBN 978-7-5004-6582-9). She kindly copied the article, and the preface, the table of contents, and the ISBN publication details page, all of which are needed for verification.
What’s the price of doing nothing?
The first Koori Centre lecture for 2008 was given by John Hobson, “Towards a model for training Indigenous languages educators in Australia” [the full paper will be up via the e-repository shortly). And a timely and thought-inducing talk it was too.
John’s recently been to Canada, the US and Aotearoa /NZ, looking at Indigenous languages education there. He’s come back convinced that we need to do a lot more in Australia to improve the way Indigenous languages are taught. The price of doing nothing is that kids will lose interest in Indigenous languages, and won’t put the effort in that’s needed to go beyond saying a few words and singing a song or two.
On the (highly) political side, he’s come back convinced that the existence of treaties has created climates much more favourable to Indigenous languages rights in those countries than we have in Australia.
On the money side, he noted the major difference between the user-pays attitude to education found in the US and Canada, and the reliance on governments here and in NZ. Native Americans and Native Canadians are using money from mining, from gambling, from whatever resources they have to pay for language work. In practice this means a great diversity in what’s on offer, since some groups have far more resources than others. It also means that they rely more on summer and winter institutes (the inpsirations for our Indigenous Languages Institute and Australian Linguistics Institutes) than we in Australia have.
On the less (but still) political side, he highlighted the growing realisation that, like any children learning languages, Indigenous children need qualified teachers who are fluent speakers of the language. (This point has been emphasised by Timoti Karetu (Inaugural Commissioner of Maori Language) *).
Another State signs on..
After South Australia, and New South Wales, another Australian State gets serious about bringing Indigenous languages into schools.
The Queensland Studies Authority has released a flyer [.pdf] about Indigenous languages, affirming that, among other things:
“understanding the language backgrounds of Indigenous students is a critical factor in the successful learning of Standard Australian English as part of formal education in Queensland schools”
and
“it is valuable for all students to understand the language diversity of Australia’s Indigenous peoples”
and finally, the promise..
“Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community perspectives on valuing, maintaining and reviving local languages will be supported through our products and services.”
A start, a start! Good on the many people who have worked to get this up.
2020 vision (maybe) on Australia’s language capacity
Among the people invited to share ideas at the 2020 Summit on visions for Australia’s future are several speakers of traditional Indigenous Languages, Jeannie Nungarrayi Egan, Raymattja Marika and Thomas Jangala Rice. Apart from them, as far as I can see, linguists haven’t got a look in. Our ideas aren’t part of the vision for Australia. Sigh, so what’s new?
Australia’s language capacity has declined. This includes the capacity to speak the languages of our neighbours, the loss of Australia’s Indigenous language heritage, and the fact that Indigenous children in remote communities are not learning Standard English. Changes in policy are needed to rebuild our ability as a country to learn and use languages. It’d be great if the summit considered this as something to push for.
Dhanggati reference book
Dhanggati people (Dhanggati is the language of the Macleay Valley) and linguists are well served by a new 205 page reference book on the language.
Lissarrague, Amanda. 2007. Dhanggati grammar and dictionary. Nambucca Heads: Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Cooperative 14 Bellwood Road, Nambucca Heads NSW 2448.
It’s another Muurrbay product (in 2006 they published a reference book on the Hunter River language by Lissarrague) which really justifies the funding from the Maintenance of Indigenous Languages and Records programme, now housed in the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts.
Culturally appropriate education – ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and ‘and’
The Australian‘s running a campaign against cultural appropriateness where it pertains to Indigenous Australians. Cultural awareness courses, out the window! Cultural training for journalists? No need! Last Saturday they had a front-page story taking up a paper due out this week on Indigenous children’s education by the economist Helen Hughes of the Centre for Independent Studies. Helen Hughes, so The Australian claims, is saying that educational apartheid exists in the Northern Territory (a claim denied by Nadine Williams, the very experienced President of the NT Branch of the Australian Education Union, but The Australian buries her view at the end of the article. A teacher talking about education isn’t sexy; an economist is).
What The Australian is licking its chops over is that apparently Hughes is inveighing against ‘culturally appropriate’ teaching methods.
I’m with them in that the term ‘culturally appropriate’ has been over-/ab-/mis- and sloppily -used ( Lexical Integrity, die!), and in that the idea of Western science and Western maths versus Indigenous science and Indigenous maths looks like a false opposition. Science is science – I want the bridges I cross over and the planes I fly in to be constructed according to the best available science and technology, Indigenous, non-Indigenous, Chinese, English or whatever.
Where we part company is as to how the best available understandings of science and maths are to be taught and in recognising that Indigenous people have knowledge which should be built on.
Cool times at Kioloa
This year’s Australian languages workshop, the seventh, was very well organised by Kazuko Obata, Jutta Besold, Jo Caffery and the rest of their committee. It was held at Kioloa [kai’oʊlə], ANU’s field station on the NSW south coast. Spongy green grass and tall green trees make it a far cry from drought-ridden Canberra, and the extent of the wilderness is restful. Walking along a white beach to the Murramarang Aboriginal area (very good signs with information on local words for sea creatures and traditional practices). Generations of rainbow lorikeets trained by generations of students to perch on arms, shoulders, knees. Boobook owls calling in the night as we looked at the Milky Way during Earth Hour.
The weather was perfect, warm, and the papers were cool..
Australian Linguistics Institute and LingFest 2008
The Australian Linguistics Institute is now open for online registration [finally – oh the pain of making a rego page that’s secure AND university-compliant, tax-compliant, human-compliant...]. Short, intensive courses will be presented by some excellent linguists from 7th – 11th July 2008, at the University of Sydney. It is a great opportunity for linguists, language professionals, graduate students and advanced undergraduates to learn more about a wide range of topics in language. Plus there’s to be a three day Indigenous Languages Institute sponsored by the Koori Centre which will bring heaps of Indigenous people working on languages together to work on problems of language maintenance and language revitalisation.
Participants may register for up to four courses during the week-long ALI. Each course is offered for 1.5 hours each day for five days. Topics include psycholinguistics (Anne Cutler), first language acquisition (Rosalind Thornton and Stephen Crain), morpho-syntax (Brett Baker, Greville Corbett, Mark Harvey, Rachel Nordlinger, Gert Webelhuth and Regine Eckhardt), computational linguistics (Robert Dale, Mary Dalrymple, Mark Dras), Japanese grammar (Nerida Jarkey and Harumi Minagawa), sociolinguistics (Jennifer Hay, Michael Clyne, Diana Eades), semantics (Bert Peeters, Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka), discourse and conversational analysis (Celia Kitzinger, Jim Martin, Sigrid Norris), sign language linguistics and grammaticalisation (Louise de Beuzeville and Trevor Johnston), contact language typology (Ian Smith), quantitative methods (Carsten Roever) and educational linguistics (William Armour, Ryuko Kubota, Ahmar Mahboob, Aek Phakiti).
Do book your accommodation early, as the combination of World Youth Day and the Pope’s visit the following week mean that accommodation may be taken up.