Book language as a foreign language — ESL strategies for indigenous learners

This study addresses the belated realisation that educators are unaware that many Indigenous Australian students speak very little Standard Australian English outside classrooms. This important educational issue is prominent in communities and schools where creoles and related language varieties, including Indigenous Englishes, are spoken. The study confirmed that the ESL educational needs of Australian Indigenous students are not adequately recognised or met

Towards a unique archive of Aboriginal languages: a collaborative project

Charles Darwin University Library is directly helping to sustain and preserve Aboriginal language and cultural materials that encounter many hurdles for their long-term survival. The library is supporting an ARC-funded project known as the Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages, by providing a repository, web application, digitisation programme and professional advice. The collaboration between the library and research team addressed a number of challenges in relation to appropriate ways to represent complex and variable metadata, widely varying content from diverse sources and in various conditions, and in making these fragile and endangered materials accessible to a global audience. The open access archive now includes thousands of items in dozens of Northern Territory Indigenous languages, providing a sustainable repository for researchers and allowing Indigenous communities to share their languages, histories, knowledge and practices around the world. The project serves as a rich case study demonstrating how academic libraries can work with researchers to support the archiving of cultural heritage

Shared soundscapes: The (re)activation of an institutional and individual archive of Peruvian music and dance

“Shared soundscapes” is a key concept that allows us to identify the multiplicity of agencies involved in historical sound recordings and their reactivation today. We use the notion to compare two very different Peruvian case studies concerning Asháninka and Nomatsiguenga peoples of the Central Rainforest and Muchik, Quechua, and mestizo peoples in the Lambayeque region, along with their respective music traditions. Part of their sonic legacy is stored in archives; one was created by an individual anthropologist, and the other is an institutional ethnomusicological archive. The comparison of historical and current soundscapes brings to the fore anthropological issues regarding how a web of actors—among them sonic activists from academia and these communities—have shaped these archives as a process and practice. It raises questions about collaborative approaches to decolonize repositories, which implies handing over rights to individuals and communities so that they can make decisions about their sonic legacies

Representing information about words digitally

The late 1960s saw the start of the "electronic-dictionary age" (de Schryver, 2003). The growth in the use of computers has transformed all aspects of dictionary-making, from collecting data about word meanings and uses, creating a set of dictionary entries, and displaying, using, preserving and distributing these entries and the data on which they are based. This paper discusses the transformations, and considers the ways in which dictionaries for minority languages are leading or lagging in the electronic-dictionary age. Illustrations are taken mostly from the uses of digital sound in modern multimedia dictionaries.Australian Academy of the Humanities; Australian E-Humanities Network; Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Sydney; School of Society, Culture and Performance, Faculty of Arts, University of Sydne

Aboriginal perspectives matter: Yarning and reflecting about teaching literacies with multimodal Aboriginal texts

Reporting on a qualitative study, informed by Australian Government Indigenous education and literacy policies, this article unveils early career teacher reflections about infusing Aboriginal perspectives in the English curriculum using multimodal texts. Forging a praxis between the Aboriginal practice of yarning (Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010) and Freire’s (1974, 1996) frameworks for conscientisation and teachers as facilitators, the project overlays the work of Ladson-Billings (1995) and Foster, Halliday, Baize & Chisholm (2020), to unravel how culturally responsive pedagogy manifests in early career primary school teaching. We discuss teacher starting points and challenges to be culturally responsive educators, who use appropriate Aboriginal texts in classrooms. Results suggest that yarning is useful for meeting English curriculum outcomes and for collaboratively developing decolonising knowledge, which can impact multiple stakeholders. Recommendations for future research include co-designed projects to support teacher education through multimodal texts and yarning practices with Aboriginal Elders

Keep that language going! A needs-based review of the status of indigenous languages in South Australia

A consultancy carried out by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, South Australia.Patrick McConvell, Rob Amery, Mary-Anne Gale, Christine Nicholls, Jonathan Nicholls, Lester Irabinna Rigney and Simone Ulalka Tu

Where should we learn our native language?: Four cases of indigenous communities in Latin America

This research was presented at the colloquium “The fate of linguistic heritage: transmitted to the younger generations or lost?” held at the RAS Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in May 2021. My presentation was a short overview of the language acquisition patterns within four indigenous communities in Latin America, speakers of the following indigenous languages: South Eastern Huastec (Mayan, Mexico), Tsotsil of San Isidro de la Libertad (Mayan, Mexico), Huilliche/Tsesungun (Mapudungan, Chile) and Mixe (Mixe-Zoquean, Mexico). I carried out extensive fieldwork and research with these communities (more details can be found in Kondic 2021, Kondic 2021 (forthcoming), Kondic 2015b, Kondic 2014a, Kondic 2014b, Kondic 2011b, Kondic 2010). At the moment my research concentrates on the sociolinguistic situation with the language Mixe (Mixe-Zoquean, Mexico), namely, on their language attitudes. During each of these four projects I produced learning materials to facilitate language teaching and revitalization (Kondic 2009b, Kodic 2016, Kondic 2015a, Kondic 2013b, Kondic 2015c, Kondic 2018b). The materials I produced and left in the communities are now being used for language teaching and maintenance. In this article I am going to present my insight into the patterns of native language learning within the above four communities. Many of Mexican indigenous languages are at present in decline and falling into disuse. Language endangerment often causes interruption in the process of language transmission, and it will be interesting to see what the situation is like within these different languages of Latin America that I had an opportunity to work with.I South Eastern Huastec (Mayan, Mexico) II Tsotsil of San Isidro de la Libertad (Mayan, Mexico) III Huilliche/Tsesungun (Mapudungan, Chile) IV Mixe (Mixe-Zoquean, Mexico