Australian Aboriginal students in higher education

One of the striking features of Australian higher education over the last ten years has been the marked increase in participation by Indigenous Australians. In a National Review of Education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, carried out in 1994, it was noted that the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students had more than doubled between 1988 and 1993 (National Review of Education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, 1994:28-29). Indigenous Australians constitute 1.6 per cent of the population of Australia and in 1993 some 5,578 indigenous people were attending Australian public universities, which is 1.3% of all Australian students in percentage terms. Edith Cowan University, in 1995, had an overall student population of 18,058 and an Aboriginal student population of 359 (2% of the total). In some ways, however, these encouraging figures are deceptive. A majority of the Aboriginal students enrolled in the university (64%) are engaged in bridging courses which were set up to prepare them for entry to university degrees. Like the degree students, some of these are on campus, some in regional centres and some are enrolled as external students, coming to the university twice a semester for a week\u27s intensive tuition. The population of Indigenous Australians in higher education also differs from the non-Indigenous population in that they are more likely to have gained entry through special provisions: they are older when commencing university and they are under-represented in many areas of study, particularly science, technology and the more prestigious professional areas such as medicine, law and engineering

Tackling talk : teaching and assessing oral language

Tackling Talk was a collaborative research project sponsored by several bodies: the English Teachers Association (ETA), the Australian Literacy Educators\u27 Association (ALEA) through Quality Teacher Program funding and the Association of Independent Schools of WA (AISWA). A team of researchers from the Centre for Applied Language and Literacy Research (CALLR), Edith Cowan University, guided teachers from the public and independent sectors through an action research program involving online/ electronic materials, professional development sessions and personal mentoring. Some 49 teachers from 28 schools from both metropolitan and regional districts of Western Australia were involved in the project

Towards more user-friendly education for speakers of Aboriginal English

The project reported on here set out, on a basis of cooperation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal investigators working in university, educational system and classroom contexts, to lead to understandings which would enable a more accessible ( userfriendly ) education to be provided for students in primary and secondary schools who are speakers of Aboriginal English. Specifically, in the context of schools of the Education Department of Western Australia, the project sought to: 1. extend knowledge and understanding of Aboriginal English and its areas of contrast with standard Australian English; 2. provide clarification in the following under-researched areas of Aboriginal English: a) semantic fields; b) functions of language use in relation to form; c) genres; d) particular registers; e) codes. 3. relate Aboriginal ways of approaching experience and knowledge to: a) curriculum; b) student outcome statements; c) pedagogical strategies to support two-way learning..

Embracing plurality through oral language

The transmission and dissemination of knowledge in Aboriginal societies for the most part occurs orally in an Aboriginal language or in Aboriginal English. However, whilst support is given to speaking skills in Indigenous communities, in our education system less emphasis is given to developing equivalent oral communicative competence in Standard Australian English (SAE). Instead the focus is given to the ongoing assessment of reading and writing skills and grammatical knowledge – this is in direct contrast to the existing language experience of Aboriginal students. Therefore, for Aboriginal students to participate in mainstream society, we suggest that there is a need to nurture oral language skills in SAE and provide learners with the experience to develop their code-switching ability to maintain continuity with their first language or dialect. Drawing on previous research that we and others have undertaken at several schools, this paper highlights the need for three fundamental changes to take place within language education: (1) school policies to change and explicitly accept and support Aboriginal English in code-switching situations; (2) familiarity among school staff about the major differences between Aboriginal English and SAE; and (3) tasks that focus on developing and practising the ‘when, why and how’ of code-switching

Affective Aspects of Language Learning: Beliefs, Attitudes, Efficacy

The focus of this study is the relationship between language attitude, beliefs, efficacy, English language competence, and language achievement. Two hundred and eighty-five students from five metropolitan primary schools in Western Australia completed a specially designed questionnaire based on the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (Gardner, 1985a). A different language was taught in each of the five schools: French (24%), German (19%), Indonesian (19%), Italian (16%), and Japanese (22%). Fifteen percent of students spoke another language in addition to English. Thirteen percent of students were not born in Australia. No student had been in Australia for less than two years. After controlling for the effects of gender, age, and language studied, language efficacy was found to be a significant predictor of language achievement. However, this effect disappeared in the presence of English-speaking competence, which remained as the only significant predictor from the group of language affect and English competency variables. A confounding effect was observed for the variable language studied. These results tend to support Cummins' (1992) suggestion that first and second language proficiency have a common underlying interdependence. Given these tentative findings, the research reported in this paper shows that the interrelationships between affective factors and language learning are both complex and dynamic and ripe for further exploration