Language and interaction in a Standard Australian English as an additional language or dialect environment: The schooling experiences of children in an Australian Aboriginal community

Multilingualism and multiculturalism are increasing around the world, and as a result, classrooms are becoming more linguistically and culturally diverse. This dissertation examines how young plurilingual children communicate in one Francophone preschool in British Columbia, Canada. In this province of Canada, French is a minority language with most people speaking English. There are also many other languages present, such as Mandarin, German, Punjabi, and Tagalog. Speakers of these languages are often higher in number than French home language speakers (Statistics Canada, 2016). Therefore, the children at the Francophone preschool are in contact with multiple, diverse languages. The diversity present in this preschool classroom raises questions about how the linguistic resources available to children influence their classroom interactions. The aim of this study was to identify the linguistic resources demonstrated by the children and determine how they utilised these resources to negotiate meaning in classroom interactions – specifically, interactions during child-initiated play. Research has shown that participation in social interactions is necessary for children to develop language and social skills. In addition, play is an important context in which young children communicate and negotiate meaning. Many studies on classroom interactions have focused on educator-child interactions. In contrast, there are limited studies on peer interactions despite research advocating their benefits in children’s development. In a multilingual classroom, children have a choice of language which often depends on the interactants. Despite educators attempting to separate languages, children usually code-switch and draw upon a range of linguistic resources to communicate. These linguistic resources include the use of multimodal language such as gestures, a recent focus of study in the field of second language acquisition. Considering the diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds of children in preschool classrooms, it is vital to understand how they incorporate multiple linguistic resources in their communications. By understanding children’s use of linguistic resources, we can further understandings of their language learning processes in the classroom. A conceptual framework drawing on sociocultural and interactionist theories was used to explore how young plurilingual children communicate. Within these two theories, language is a social action in which an interaction is co-constructed by the participants. The two concepts of plurilingualism and multimodal language were part of this framework. From this perspective, each child in the study were considered to possess a unique linguistic repertoire consisting of verbal and nonverbal resources. As a participant-observer, I collected data in one preschool classroom over a 3-month period. The primary data source was video recordings from two cameras – a camcorder and a GoPro camera. In addition, I collected field notes, school-related documents, and a questionnaire completed by the children’s parents/guardians. These data contributed background information on the preschool and participants. Interactions occurring during child-initiated play were analysed in order to answer the research questions. I used a computer software program, ATLAS.ti, to assist with the data analysis. The analysed interactions involved 13 children (3- and 4-year-olds), the classroom teacher, the teaching assistant, and me (as the participant-researcher). The findings of the study showed that the children employed multiple resources in their play interactions. They used French spoken resources, English spoken resources and non-verbal actions, as well as translanguaging (French and English) and non-verbal actions combined with spoken language. The children’s choice of linguistic resources related to the interactant, the purpose of the interaction, and their own motivations to exercise agency. Through the use of various linguistic resources, the children practised their interactional and social skills, organised and advanced their own learning through translanguaging and peer teaching, and enacted agency. The children’s use of multiple linguistic resources in play interactions demonstrated their emerging plurilingual competencies. This study has highlighted the importance of educators and researchers considering individual children’s linguistic resources in a holistic manner. By adopting a holistic approach, educators can understand how children’s use of multiple linguistic resources is beneficial to their learning. Researchers can increase understandings of children and their learning processes by considering how children employ their multiple linguistic resources. The findings of this study demonstrate that young children are resourceful, engaged, creative, and agentive in their use of linguistic resources during play interactions. These skills should be considered as plurilingual assets and educators should provide opportunities for children to practise and develop these skills in the classroom.

The first part of this paper presents the view that ordinary conversation is the most basic form of talk, and that Conversation Analysis (CA) in the ethnomethodological tradition, whilst widely known in Australian applied linguistics, has been very little used here as a set of research tools. The distinctiveness of the CA approach is presented, and it is argued that CA has the potential to make a more substantial contribution to applied linguistic research than it has hitherto. Second, the paper considers how some basic CA research – into receipt tokens such as mm,yeah, ohand others in Australian English – might be applied to a language teaching, and specifically into the development of teaching materials in an adult ESL context. It is argued that CA has the potential for wider application in Australian applied linguistics alongside some of the more widespread and better known qualitative research methods.

The Differentiation Phase (Phase 5 of Schneider’s Dynamic Model) has so far been reached by only a handful of settler Englishes: American English, Australian English, Canadian English, New Zealand English, with internal diversification as well as unique admixtures of indigenized and adstrate varieties. In Australian English this is in its early stages, though there’s little adstrate differentiation in evidence despite continuing waves of immigration. Fully fledged differentiation (including phonological, morphosyntactic and lexical divergences) is however conspicuous in Australian Aboriginal communities, in a distinctive indigenized English (Aboriginal English) which is spoken in widely separated areas especially across the centre and north of Australia. The resilience of AborE poses larger questions of how an indigenized variety can continue to evolve under an established and dominant settler variety.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the linguistic realizations of the advice speech act in Persian as a first language and English as a second language. More specifically, the study aimed at exploring the linguistic and pragmatic strategies used by Persian speakers when offering unsolicited advice in both their first and second language. Furthermore, the research project investigated the social and cultural norms and values that can affect the formulation of advice. The study based its argument on a corpus of data elicited by means of a Persian and an English version of a Discourse Completion Test and three Focus Group Discussions. In an effort to learn more about culture-specific patterns of advice in Persian language and culture, the Persian and English data were compared to data produced by a group of native speakers of Australian English, who mainly served as a reference group. The data were analyzed focusing on six major components of the advice speech act: (1) the use of advice speech act; (2) level of directness and advice strategies; (3) supportive move strategies; (4) internal modification strategies; (5) alerters and gambits and (6) level of formality. Moreover, the major themes and trends which emerged from the Focus Group Discussions were explored and analyzed qualitatively. The results of the study showed that the Persian speaking participants preferred a direct style and adhered closely to the social and cultural norms and assumptions of their native language and culture when offering advice in both their first and second language. The analysis of the data from the Australian English speakers revealed that these participants preferred to avoid advice giving or mitigated the force of their advice by means of a wide range of strategies. The findings of this study indicate that the formulation of advice is linked to the underpinning sociocultural views of the speakers, and cross-cultural differences in the use and interpretation of advice speech act are likely to result in miscommunication and misperception when people engage in communication in English as an international language. The results of the study contribute to a better understanding of the role of the culture-specific values which dominate advice giving behavior among Persian speakers. The study also presents a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of the findings for the teaching and learning English in its global context.

ABSTRACTThis article is a conversation-analytic investigation of the forms of organization that allow specific items of classroom discourse – words, phrases, up to whole turns at talk – to be altered by subsequent items. Central to the article is an analytic distinction between self-correction and other-correction, that is, between repair sequences in which the speaker of the initial item (the “trouble source”) makes the correction and instances in which this is performed by one of her or his interlocutors (cf. Jefferson 1974; Schegloff et al. 1977). The classroom case is analytically interesting both for its own sake and also on account of research speculations that other-correction should be more frequent in adult-child talk than in other genres of conversation. However, in order to provide an analysis of the problem sensitive to the particularities of the classroom, it is necessary to look not merely at corrections, but at the larger repair trajectories in which they occur. These trajectories consist of corrections plus their prior initiations, the latter being means by which speakers mark out some item as requiring correction. Once the social identities of teacher and student are mapped against self-and other-forms of initiation and correction, it is possible to discern some of the structural preferences of classroom discourse along the general axis of repair. The materials are taken from geography lessons in Australian high school classrooms. (Repair and correction, question and answer, clue-giving, expansion sequences, modulation, classroom discourse, everyday language use, Australian English, conversation analysis, sociology of education)

Beginning with a consideration of some commonsense and professional conceptions of what a formal situation might comprise, this paper goes on to ask the question: where along a linear array which has its poles in exemplars of formal and informal speech-exchange systems, can classroom talk be placed? Its answer is given in part in the form of rules for the taking of turns in classrooms, these being modifications of those, already established in the literature, for natural conversation. These rules allow for and require that formal classroom situations be constructed so as to involve differential participation rights for parties to the talk depending on their membership of the social identity-class ‘student/teacher’. The analyses which follow examine some of the applications and violations of these rules found in audio and video recordings of naturally occurring classroom talk (and transcripts thereof) for their orderliness as orientations to these rules. It is argued that the rules provide a systematic basis for the ‘feelings’ of ‘formality’ that researchers and participants have of such situations and that a decision as to the ‘formality’ or otherwise of a social situation can be predicated on the degree of pre-allocation involved in the organization of turns at talk in the situation. (Configuration and distance in interaction, conversational analysis, turn-taking systems, classroom language, sociology of education; British and Australian English).

This study investigates the development of teacher identity in a transnational context through an analysis of the voices of sixteen preservice teachers from Hong Kong who engage in interaction with primary students in an Australian classroom. The context for this research is the school-based experience undertaken by these preservice English as a second language teachers as part of their short language immersion (SLIM) program in Brisbane, Australia. Such SLIM programs are a genre of study abroad programs which have been gaining in popularity within teacher education in Australia, attended by preservice and inservice teachers from China, Hong Kong, Korea, and other Asian countries. This research is conducted at a time when the imperative to globalise higher education provision is a strategic factor in the educational policies of both Australia and Hong Kong. In Australia, international educational services now constitute the country’s third largest export with more than 400,000 students coming to Australia to study annually. In order to maintain Australia’s current global position as the third most popular Englishspeaking study destination, the government is now focusing on sustainability and the quality of the study experience being offered to international students (Bradley Review, 2008). In Hong Kong, the government sponsors both preservice and inservice English as a second language (ESL) teachers to undertake SLIM programs in Australia and other English-speaking countries, as part of their policy of promoting high levels of English proficiency in Hong Kong classrooms. Transnational teacher education is an important issue to which this study contributes insights into the affordances and constraints of a school-based experience in the transnational context. Second language teacher education has been defined as interventions designed to develop participants’ professional knowledge. In this study, it is argued that participation in a different community of practice helps to foreground tacit theories of second language pedagogy, making them visible and open to review. Questions of pedagogy are also seen as questions of teacher identity, constituting the way that one is in the classroom. I take up a sociocultural and poststructural framework, drawing on the work of James Gee and Mikhail Bakhtin, to theorise the construction of teacher identity as emerging through dialogic relations and socially situated discursive practices. From this perspective, this study investigates whether these teachers engage with different ways of representing themselves through appropriating, adapting or rejecting Discourses prevailing in the Australian classroom. Research suggests that reflecting on dilemmas encountered as lived experiences can extend professional understandings. In this study, the participants engage in a process of dialogic reflection on their intercultural classroom interactions, examining with their peers and their lecturer/researcher selected moments of dissonance that they have faced in the unfamiliar context of an Australian primary classroom. It is argued that the recursive and multivoiced nature of this process of reflection on practice allows participants opportunities to negotiate new understandings of second language teacher identity. Dialogic learning, based on the theories of Bakhtin and Vygotsky, provides the theoretic framing not only for the process of reflection instantiated in this study, but also features in the analysis of the participants’ second language classroom practices. The research design uses a combined discourse analytic and ethnographic approach as a logic-of-inquiry to explore the dialogic relationships which these second language teachers negotiate with their students and their peers in the transnational context. In this way, through discourse analysis of their classroom talk and reflective dialogues, assisted by the analytic tools of speech genres and discourse formats, I explore the participants’ ways of doing and being second language teachers. Thus, this analysis traces the process of ideological becoming of these beginner teachers as shifts in their understandings of teacher and student identities. This study also demonstrates the potential for a nontraditional stimulated recall interview to provide dialogic scaffolding for beginner teachers to reflect productively on their practice.

The Auslan and Australian English archive and corpus is the first bilingual, multi-modal documentation of a deaf signed language (Auslan, the language of the Australian deaf community) and its ambient spoken language (Australian English). It aims to facilitate the direct comparison of face-to-face, multi-modal talk produced by deaf signers and hearing speakers from the same city. Here, we describe the documentation of the bilingual, multi-modal archive and outline its development pathway into a directly comparable corpus of a signed language and spoken language. We differentiate it from existing bilingual corpora and offer some research questions which the resulting corpus may be best placed to answer. The Auslan and Australian English corpus has the potential to redress several significant misunderstandings in the comparison of signed and spoken languages, especially those that follow from misapplications of the paradigm that multi-modal signed languages are used and structured in ways that are parallel to the uni-modal spoken or written conventions of spoken languages.

This chapter presents a quantitative analysis of the frequency and function of you know among L1 speakers of Irish and Australian English and L2 speakers of Polish and Chinese background, residing in Ireland. Results show no significant differences in the frequency of you know in Irish as compared to Australian English. However, you know was highly correlated with I mean in Australian English only. Among the L2 speakers, you know was significantly more frequent among the Polish group as compared to both the Chinese group and the L1 group. Proficiency in English and length of residence were not found to be significant predictors of this trend, although Poles with lower levels of education were found to use more you know. Both L1 groups used more interpersonal functions of you know as compared to the L2 groups, who favored its coherence functions. The findings indicate that the prevalence of you know may contribute to its rapid adoption by L2 speakers, but more close analysis reveals potential challenges for L2 speakers to acquire the full range of functions of discourse–pragmatic markers in spoken discourse. The study shows the importance of examining both frequency and function of discourse–pragmatic markers in language contact situations.

In culturally and linguistically diverse school settings, English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) specialist teachers play a critical role in fostering equitable, socially just, and responsive learning environments. In Australia, EAL/D learners are students whose first language is not Standard Australian English (SAE) and who require targeted support to develop proficiency in SAE. This paper reports on a study examining EAL/D teachers’ reported pedagogical practices that nurture multilingual students’ plurilingual repertoires as acts of social justice. Framed through pedagogical judgement—encompassing action, reasoning, and responsibility—the study explored how teachers leveraged students’ cultural and linguistic resources as learning assets. Data were generated through in-depth semi-structured interviews with five EAL/D specialist teachers working with newly arrived Ezidi refugee-background students in a regional town in New South Wales. Findings indicate that teachers enacted inclusive, plurilingual practices grounded in strong pedagogical reasoning and a moral commitment to equity. Despite recognising persistent monolingual and deficit discourses, teachers actively challenged these narratives by affirming students’ linguistic and cultural identities.

Investigating First Year Undergraduate EAL Students' Academic Literacy Experiences.

This story not for myself … all over Australia story.No matter Aborigine, White-European, secret before,Didn’t like im before White-European…This time White-European must come to Aborigine,Listen Aborigine and understand it.Understand that culture, secret, what dreaming.— Senior Lawman Neidjie, Story about Feeling (78)IntroductionIn Senior Lawman Neidjie’s beautiful little book, with big knowledge, Story about Feeling (1989), he shares with us, his readers, the importance of feeling our connectedness with the land around us. We have heard his words and this is our effort to articulate our respect and responsibility in return. We are a small group of undergraduate students and a lecturer at the University of Newcastle (a mixed “mob” with non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal heritages) participating in an English course designed around listening to the knowledge stories of Country, in the context of Country as the energy and agency of the lands around us and not just a physical setting, as shared by those who know it best. We are a diverse group of people. We have different, individual, purposes for taking this course, but with a common willingness to listen which has been strengthened through our exposure to Aboriginal literature. This paper is the result of our lived experience of practice-led research. We have written this paper as a collective group and therefore we use “we” to represent and encompass our distinct voices in this shared learning journey. We write this paper within the walls, physically and psychologically, of western academia, built on the lands of the Darkinjung peoples. Our hope is to rethink the limits of epistemic boundaries in western discourses of education; to engage with Aboriginal ways of knowing predominantly through the pedagogical and personal act of listening. We aspire to reimagine our understanding of, and complicity with, public memory while simultaneously shifting our engagement with the land on which we stand, learn, and live. We ask ourselves: can we re-imagine the institutionalised space of our classroom through a dialogic pedagogy? To attempt to do this we have employed intersubjective dialogues, where our role is mostly that of listeners (readers) of stories of Country shared by Aboriginal voices and knowledges such as Neidjie’s. This paper is an articulation of our learning journey to re-imagine the tertiary classroom, re-imagine the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australian knowledges, perspectives and peoples, re-imagine our collective consciousness on Aboriginal lands and, ultimately, to re-imagine ourselves. Re-imagining the Tertiary English Literature Classroom Our intersubjective dialogues have been built around listening to the stories (reading a book) from Aboriginal Elders who share the surface knowledge of stories from their Countries. These have been the voices of Neidjie, Max Dulumunmun Harrison in My People’s Dreaming (2013), and Laklak Burarrwanga et al. in Welcome to My Country (2013). Using a talking circle format, a traditional method of communication based upon equality and respect, within the confines of the four-walled institute of Western education, our learning journey moved through linear time, meeting once a week for two hours for 13 weeks. Throughout this time we employed Joshua Guilar’s notion of an intersubjective dialogue in the classroom to re-imagine our tertiary journey. Guilar emphasises the actions of “listening and respect, direction, character building and authority” (para 1). He argues that a dialogic classroom builds an educative community that engages both learners and teachers “where all parties are open to learning” (para 3). To re-imagine the tertiary classroom via talking circles, the lecturer drew from dialogic instruction which privileges content as:the major emphasis of the instructional conversation. Dialogic instruction includes a sharing of power. The actions of a dialogic instructor can be understood on a continuum with an autocratic instructional style at one end and an overly permissive style on the other. In the middle of the continuum are dialogic-enabling behaviors, which make possible a radical pedagogy. (para 1) Re-imaging the lecturer’s facilitating role has not been without its drawbacks and issues. In particular, she had to examine her own subjectivity and role as teacher while also adhering to the expectations of her job as an academic employee in the University. Assessing students, their developing awareness of Aboriginal ways of knowing, was not without worry. Advocating a paradigm shift from dominant ways of teaching and learning, while also adhering to expected tertiary discourses and procedures (such as developing marking rubrics and providing expectations regarding the format of an essay, referencing information, word limits, writing in standard Australian English and being assessed according to marks out of 100 that are categorised as Fails, Passes, Credits, Distinctions, or High Distinctions) required constant self-reflexivity and attempts at pedagogical transparency, for instance, the rubrics for assessing assignments were designed around the course objectives and then shared with the students to gauge understanding of, and support for, the criteria. Ultimately it was acknowledged that the lecturer’s position within the hierarchy of western learning carried with it an imbalance of power, that is, as much as she desired to create a shared and equal learning space, she decided and awarded final grades. In an effort to continually and consciously work through this, the work of Gayatri Spivak on self-reflexivity was employed: she, the lecturer, has “attempted to foreground the precariousness of [her] position throughout” although she knows “such gestures can never suffice” (271). Spivak’s work on the tendency of dominant discourses and institutions to ignore or deny the validity of non-western knowledges continues to be influential. We acknowledge the limits of our ability to engage in such a radical dialogical pedagogy: there are limits to the creativity and innovativeness that can be produced within a dominant Eurocentric academic framework. Sharing knowledge and stories cannot be a one-way process; all parties have to willingly engage in order to create meaningful exchange. This then, requires that the classroom, and this paper, reflect a space of heterogeneous voices (or “ears” required for listening) that are self-sufficiently open to hearing the stories of knowledge from the traditional custodians. Listening becomes a mode of thought where we are also aware of the impediments in our ability to hear: to hear across cultures, across histories, across generations, and across time and space. The intersubjective dialogues taking place, between us and the stories and also between each other in the classroom, allow us to deepen our understanding of the literature of Country by listening to each other’s voices. Even if they offer different opinions from our own they still contribute to our broader conception of what Country is and can mean to people. By extension, this causes us to re-evaluate the lands upon which we stand, entering a dialogue with place to reinterpret/negotiate our position within the “story” of Country. This learning and listening was re-emphasised with the words of Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann’s explanation of “Dadirri”: an inner, deep, contemplative listening and awareness (para 4). To be able to hear these stories has required a radical shift in the way we are listening. To create a space for an intersubjective dialogue to occur between the knowledge stories of Aboriginal peoples who know their Country, and us as individual and distinct listeners, Marcia Langton’s third category of an intersubjective dialogue was used. This type of dialogue involves an exchange between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians where both are positioned as subjects rather than, as historically has been the case, non-Aboriginal peoples speaking about Aboriginality positioned as “object” and “other” (81). Langton states that: ‘Aboriginality’ arises from the subjective experience of both Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people who engage in any intercultural dialogue, whether in actual lived experience or through a mediated experience such as a white person watching a program about Aboriginal people on television or reading a book. Moreover, the creation of ‘Aboriginality’ is not a fixed thing. It is created from out histories. It arises from the intersubjectivity of black and white in dialogue. (31)Langton states that historically the ways Aboriginality has been represented by the ethnographic gaze has meant that “Aboriginality” and what it means is a result of colonisation: Aboriginal peoples did not refer to themselves or think of themselves in such ways before colonisation. Therefore, we respectfully tried to listen to the knowledge stories shared by Aboriginal people through Aboriginal ways of knowing Country. Listening to Stories of Country We use the word “stories” to represent the knowledge of a place that traditional custodians of their land know and willingly share through the public publication of literature. Stories, in our understanding, are not “made-up” fictional narratives but knowledge documents of and from specific places that are physically manifested in the land while embodying metaphysical meaning as well. Stories are connected to the land and therefore they are connected to its people. We use the phrase “surface (public) knowledge” to distinguish between knowledges that anyone can hear and have access to in comparison with more private, deeper layered, secret/sacred knowledge that is not within our rights to possess or even within our ability to understand. We are, however, cognisant that this knowledge is there and respect those who know it. Finally, we employ the word Country, which, as noted above means the energy and agency of the lands around us. As

This study gives an overview of the merger of the dress and trap vowels before laterals, which occurs for some speakers of Australian English in the state of Victoria (in the south-east of the country), as well as in some other varieties of English. Research on this phenomenon in Australian English has been preliminary to date, but has uncovered some general tendencies in distribution, as well as possible motivators for actuation and spread of the change. The aim of this paper is to describe and orient the phenomenon in the context of English worldwide, and while we work with some illustrative experimental data, our aim is not to provide a detailed quantitative sociophonetic perspective here. This paper further aims to illustrate the extent of the variability seen in the Australian English community with respect to ongoing change.

Assessing and categorizing have been shown to be different types of descriptions, however, the different ways of talking involved in each have not been analyzed. Drawing on ethnomethodology, this article argues that assessing and categorizing are distinct and empirically identifiable ways of producing descriptions. These different ways of talking have practical implications for actors making descriptions. To analyze how these methods of describing work, the different manner in which they produce complex descriptions is analyzed.

Nurses' views of the coping of patients