Language In Australia Research Articles

Broadening the opportunities for Korean as a heritage language in Australia

Broadening the opportunities for Korean as a heritage language in Australia

The transmission of Spanish as a heritage language in Australia

The transmission of Spanish as a heritage language in Australia

Aboriginal Language Revival

Aboriginal language revival is a recent phenomenon in Australia (Rigney 2006; Troy 2012). Prior to British colonisation, Australia had over 250 distinct languages that could be subdivided into 600-700 dialects, clearly, Australia was composed of ‘multicultural and multilingual societies’ (Rigney 2006, 385). Today only 18 Indigenous languages are spoken by all generations of people within a given language group (Social Justice Report 2009). 
 In response to the urgent need to protect Indigenous languages, in August 2009, the Australian Government launched for the first time a strategy titled Indigenous Languages - A National Approach 2009 (Social Justice Report 2009). It highlighted the Government’s plan to preserve and revitalise Indigenous languages through targeted actions. More recently, in 2016 the state of New South Wales introduced Indigenous languages in the secondary school curriculum, with other states following. Australian universities are increasingly offering tertiary courses (Bagshaw, 2015). Subsequently, the Aboriginal Languages Act 2017 was passed in New South Wales with a 5-year plan to reawaken and nurture Aboriginal languages. 
 Meanwhile, Australian Aboriginal women play a key role in reclaiming language and their voice in the policy arena by contributing to radical pedagogies and healing through language revival programs. To this end, Indigenous scholars in Australia see their work as drawing on generations of women, particularly in the context of Grandmother’s Laws, and their contribution to resistance, challenge to stereotypes and focus on survival as an outcome (Watson 2015; Behrendt 2019). Grandmother’s law is part of Indigenous law where men and women hold equal positions with reciprocal rights and responsibilities for maintaining societal equilibrium in their own Nations and in their own languages. These interdependent roles are designated as women’s and men’s law and are also referred to as “Women’s Business” (Burarrwanga 2019, p.72) and “Men’s Business” (Canuto et al. 2018). “Grandfathers look outwardly, protecting home community, Land and camp” (Wall 2017). Grandmothers look inwardly, teaching and nurturing younger generations in having respect and responsibility to care for Country, to benefit both Land and people and to maintain cultural connection with family, language, and Land (Wall 2017). 
 As a result, competing tensions exist in the area of Indigenous language learning with government policies on the one hand providing western models for language learning within educational institutions while on the other, Indigenous community led structures are informing vital ways of re-centring language pathways. 
 The aim of this paper is to build on and contribute to work in the area of Indigenous languages in Australia by examining the intersectionality relevant to the revival of an Indigenous language in order to understand the ways in which different forms of language knowledges intersect and interact to shape experiences of oppression and privilege to address and challenge systemic forms of inequality and discrimination. It draws on a framework that is informed by the relation between knowledge and pedagogy (Apple 1993; Aronowitz & Giroux 1985) and by Indigenous pedagogy frameworks (Watson & Heath, 2004; Watson, 2015). This framework acts as a useful, yet destabilising factor that brings into question how teachers teach and what systems of knowledge are applied. 
 The study draws on interviews with Indigenous educators in both an Australian educational institution and a community context to examine the relation between people and society in the process of language revival as well as the challenges posed and solutions offered by the way various forms of language knowledges intersect.

Emotional competence in the school curriculum of Spanish as an additional language in Australia and the United Kingdom

The development of students' emotional intelligence has become a priority in integral education since the beginning of this century. Existing mental health issues in young learners brought about by the pressures and challenges of a globalized capitalist society have been put in the spotlight and exacerbated by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, which explains the need to promote this type of intelligence in education. We will focus on Australia and the UK, two contexts where social and emotional learning (SEL) has been promoted via government directives and policy documents across the curriculum. However, since both educational contexts have monolingual policies, our objective is to analyse whether emotional competence is integrated and developed throughout the Languages curriculum, specifically, in the case of Spanish as an additional language in Primary education. Drawing from SEL´s theoretical framework, and using qualitative content analysis, we will examine the above-mentioned curriculum implemented both in New South Wales and England.

The role of spoken vocabulary knowledge in language minority students’ incidental vocabulary learning from captioned television

Abstract This study was to assess the spoken vocabulary knowledge and its role in incidental vocabulary learning from captioned television. The participants were a total of 87 minority students learning English as a foreign language in Australia. The breadth of their vocabulary knowledge was measured with a vocabulary size test, while the depth of their vocabulary knowledge was through an assessment of collocational and semantic relationships. The results indicated that (1) captioned videos are helpful for incidental vocabulary learning; (2) scores on the breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge and incidental vocabulary learning from viewing captioned television are highly and positively correlated; and (3) scores on the depth of vocabulary knowledge can make a unique contribution to the prediction of incidental vocabulary learning at the form and meaning recognition level, in addition to the prediction afforded by scores on the breadth of vocabulary knowledge. The findings highlight a need to improve the depth of vocabulary knowledge for incidental vocabulary learning from captioned viewing.

The value of multilingualism for sustainable development: a case study of languages in Australia

ABSTRACT This paper forwards the notion that languages are an important resource for sustainable development for modern societies. Informed by theories from both sociolinguistics and language economics on the value of language skills, it is suggested that language(s) have different kinds of value in multilingual societies. Sociolinguists often emphasize the value languages have to their speakers and highlight the importance of social justice and equality between languages. Language economists argue that proficiencies in languages other than the dominant language are a form of human capital that can have a range of direct or indirect benefits. In language economics this is captured by the concepts of non-market and market value. Based on the example of the situation of languages in Australia, this paper argues that migration-induced multilingualism deserves more substantial support from both perspectives. Employing a theory-generating approach, this paper argues that multilingualism forms an important addition to Australia’s human capital. For sustainable development, both on economic and social levels, it appears necessary to maintain and support languages in order to enable the country to cater for present and future linguistic needs. These linguistic needs include job market demands, but extend to other aspects of social participation and cohesion.

Home language use and shift in Australia: Trends in the new millennium.

The 25 million Australians today are identified with more than 300 ancestries. People's home language use and shift patterns had demonstrated great variations as more immigrants from Asia-Pacific regions entered Australia. The ethnolinguistic composition of Australia's population had undergone substantial changes in the last few decades. Based on the statistics from Australian censuses, the present paper aims to analyze the changes of people's home language use and the shift patterns in the new Millennium. Five sets of census data released by Australian Bureau of Statistics were adopted as the secondary data source and descriptive analysis was conducted to disclose the dynamic picture of different home languages in Australia after 2000. The results suggest that the number of home language speakers in Australia has soared up quickly in the last two decades and great variations have been found between the traditional European migrant groups and the newly Asian arrivers. Mandarin has overtaken Italian and Greek to become the most populous home language other than English used in Australia since 2011 and great regional differences were also found to exist among different states and territories. Moreover, the ranking order of different home language speakers had changed considerably as compared with that in the last century. The language shift rates of different language communities and their cross-tabulations with generations, gender, age, and duration of residence in the latest available censuses after 2000 also revealed diverse developmental directions. The findings give us a glimpse of the current status of different home languages in Australia and help us to identify the potential factors impacting the shifting trends of different language communities. A better understanding of the language needs of different migrant communities may further help policymakers set more effective plans to accommodate an increasingly diverse Australian society.

Insights from the perspective of language ecologies and new contact languages in Australia

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A.W. Hamilton and the translation of English nursery rhymes into Malay

ABSTRACT A.W. Hamilton (1887–1967) was a colonial police officer who demonstrated a keen interest in the Malay language. He was a regular contributor to various magazines and journals during the colonial period. His writings, which encompass various aspects of the Malay language, Malay sayings and love charms, flora, fauna, feasts, and festivals, reflect his diverse interest in his surroundings. Also known as Haji Hamilton, he was a translator as well. He is perhaps best known for his translations of English nursery rhymes into Malay, which were published six times over a period of 70 years. Upon his retirement from the police force, Hamilton settled down in Australia. He is often credited for having made among the earliest effort to introduce the Malay language in Australia, although it did not prove to be very successful. In spite of this, very little is publicly documented about Hamilton. This article aims to explore some aspects of Hamilton’s life and discuss his language indigenisation in his translation of nursery rhymes into Malay, with the aim of providing some insights into the life of a colonial officer who was unwavering in his interest in and devotion to the Malay language.

Chinese Immigrant Teachers’ Motivation for Teaching Heritage Language in Australia: A Qualitative Study

Chinese Immigrant Teachers’ Motivation for Teaching Heritage Language in Australia: A Qualitative Study

From the Periphery to Center Stage: The Mainstreaming of Italian in the Australian Education System (1960s to 1990s)

AbstractThis article examines the complex drivers of change in language education that have resulted in Australia having the highest number of students learning Italian in the world. An analysis of academic and non-academic literature, policy documents, and quantitative data helps trace the trajectory of the Italian language in the Australian education system, from the 1960s to the 1990s, illustrating the interaction of different variables that facilitated the shift in Italian's status from a largely immigrant language to one of the most widely studied languages in Australia. This research documents the factors behind the successful mainstreaming of Italian into schools, which, in addition to the active support it received from the Italian community and the Italian government, also included, notably, the ability of different Australian governments to address societal transformation and to respond to the emerging practical challenges in scaling up new language education initiatives in a detailed and comprehensive manner.

Where have all the sound changes gone? Examining the scarcity of evidence for regular sound change in Australian languages

AbstractAlmost universally, diachronic sound patterns of languages reveal evidence of both regular and irregular sound changes, yet an exception may be the languages of Australia. Here we discuss a long-observed and striking characteristic of diachronic sound patterns in Australian languages, namely the scarcity of evidence they present for regular sound change. Since the regularity assumption is fundamental to the comparative method, Australian languages pose an interesting challenge for linguistic theory. We examine the situation from two different angles. We identify potential explanations for the lack of evidence of regular sound change, reasoning from the nature of synchronic Australian phonologies; and we emphasise how this unusual characteristic of Australian languages may demand new methods of evaluating evidence for diachronic relatedness, and new thinking about the nature of intergenerational transmission. We refer the reader also to Bowern (this volume) for additional viewpoints from which the Australian conundrum can be approached.

Journey towards an unreachable destiny: parental struggles in the intergenerational transmission of Chinese as a heritage language in Australia

Abstract This article investigates Chinese-Australian parents’ ideologies and visions about the maintenance of Chinese as a heritage language (CHL) as well as their struggles in using family language policy (FLP) as defence and coping mechanisms to address tensions associated with the transgenerational transmission of CHL. Language policy defined as an assemblage of ideologies, practices and management and parental agency understood as parents’ capacity to pursue their visions are deployed within Curdt-Christiansen’s dynamic model of FLP that accommodates a complex interplay of internal and external factors. The study focuses on 15 parents who were committed to and made agentive efforts to maintain CHL and transmit it to their next generations. Using interviews, parents’ visions based on their children’s future CHL proficiency and their agentive efforts around CHL transmission were examined. The findings revealed sharp contrasts between parents’ future visions and their lived experiences of struggles at present. Anticipating the eventual loss of CHL among their future generations in the Australian context, the parents struggled to negotiate FLP to combat the foreseeable language shift and defend their visions. The findings have implications for individuals, families, communities, institutions, and policies concerning the maintenance of heritage languages in Australia and globally.

The Teaching and Learning Toolkit: Communicating research evidence to inform decision‐making for policy and practice in education

AbstractThis article compares and contrasts two versions of the Education Endowment Foundation's (EEF) Teaching and Learning Toolkit (‘Toolkit’), a web‐based summary of international evidence on teaching 3–18 year‐olds. The Toolkit has localised versions in six different languages in Australia, Cameroon, Chile, Jordan and Spain. The initial Toolkit, created in 2011 with funding from the Sutton Trust and updated since then with funding from EEF, drew upon over 250 meta‐analyses across 30 areas of education research. An updated version, drawing on a database of over 2500 single studies from these meta‐analyses was launched in Autumn 2021. This change was motivated by increased interest in evidence‐use in education, and a desire to engage in more rigorous synthesis of primary studies. The article presents the rationale for these changes, outlines the methods adopted to populate and analyse the Toolkit database and presents results from this analysis. Findings indicate that although the broad picture of the relative benefits of the different approaches is similar, a more fine‐grained analysis is possible. This deeper synthesis can provide more specific guidance about what has been successful in the different areas of the Toolkit in research studies and offers opportunities for further refinement and improvement. This increased specificity, however, comes at the cost of greater complexity in the findings and the implications for policy and practice, and it increases the challenge of ensuring findings are both accurate and accessible. A final section reflects on the challenges of summarising evidence from research to inform decision‐making in education.

Nominal Groups in Pitjantjatjara

This chapter explores nominal grammar resources in Pitjantjatjara, an Indigenous language of Australia's Western Desert. Data for the description comes primarily from recordings of oral discourse. The description takes a discourse semantic perspective on ideational and textual resources in nominal grammar. Options are described for construing entities by naming, pronaming, classifying, describing, numbering, determining and qualifying. From text examples, a distinctive configuration of meaning options emerges that is characteristic of this language.

On the Integration of Dative Adjuncts into Event Structures in Yapa Languages

Warlpiri and Warlmanpa (Ngumpin-Yapa languages of Australia) exhibit a complex predicate construction in which a class of preverbs introduces a single argument that is not shared by the argument structure of the inflecting verb, nor is there necessarily any shared event structure. This is problematic for many theories of linking structures of complex predicates, since no arguments or events are shared between the predicative elements of the complex predicate. The same grammatical relation is instantiated by a beneficiary adjunct. In light of new research in event and argument structure, I propose a lexical rule which introduces an applicative argument to account for the beneficiary construction; and that the preverbs take another predicate as one of their arguments to account for the complex predicates. The applicative rule and the preverbs both introduce an argument of the same grammatical relation, leading to interesting interactions, given that two grammatical relations of the same type are not expected to co-occur within a single clause.

Matjarr Djuyal: How Using Gesture in Teaching Gathang Helps Preschoolers Learn Nouns

There are important efforts being made to revitalise Aboriginal languages in Australia, which are both pedagogically and culturally appropriate. This research seeks to expand the current knowledge of the effectiveness of gesturing as a teaching strategy for young children learning the Gathang language. An experimental method was used to investigate the effectiveness of gesture by employing a context in which other variables (e.g., other teaching pedagogies) could be held constant. Participants, age range 4–5.2 years, were taught Gathang nouns with gesture and without gesture, alongside verbal and pictorial instruction. After the teaching sessions, each child was assessed for their receptive and expressive knowledge of the Gathang nouns, at two time points, two days after instruction (post-test 1) and one week after (post-test 2). At post-test 2, children had stronger receptive knowledge for words they had learned with gesture than without. These findings contribute to a growing body of research attesting to the effectiveness of gesture for improving knowledge acquisition amongst learners. In the context of Aboriginal language revitalisation, gesture also aligns with traditional teaching practices and offers a relatively low-cost strategy for helping teachers assist their students in acquiring Aboriginal languages.

“I Speak My Language My Way!”—Young People’s Kunwok

Bininj Kunwok is a Gunwinyguan language (a non-Pama-Nyungan) spoken in west Arnhem Land and Kakadu National Park, NT, Australia. With around 2500 speakers and children learning it as a first language, Kunwok is one of the strongest Indigenous languages in Australia. Despite its small speech community, it exhibits considerable variation, much of which has been the subject of recent research. One of the primary findings from this study into variation in Kunwok is the rich interspeaker diversity, particularly between different generations of Kunwok speakers. Comparing the speech of young adults and children with that of their elders through a multigenerational corpus has revealed a language change in progress (demonstrated both in real time and apparent time). This paper will discuss three of the key differentiating features of young people’s Kunwok: word-initial engma production, pronominal forms and paradigms and loanwords. We will also examine community members’ perspectives on young people’s Kunwok on the basis that they provide insight into the ideological frameworks that support the linguistic variation and change documented in the community. In conclusion, the paper will summarise the findings, outlining the main features of young people’s Kunwok, and then reflect on the trajectory of Kunwok and the contributions of this study to our understanding of language change in the Australian Aboriginal context.

Increasing second language production with gestures

Abstract Gesture-based methods of teaching second languages have increasingly attracted interest. Previous research has linked gesture with language learning; however, little is known about the impact on learners’ language production, and even less is known about the impact of the unique Intentional Teaching Gestures (ITG) used in many second language programs. This empirical case study investigated the impact of learning with ITG on the oral language production of 170 primary school students learning Japanese as a second language in Australia, using a quasi-experimental approach with Story Re-tell methodology. Findings identify that viewing ITG increased learners’ language retrieval and quantity of oral language produced and highlight the pedagogical value of viewing ITG as a scaffolding tool.

Review of Ozolins (1993): The Politics of Language in Australia

Review of Ozolins (1993): The Politics of Language in Australia