JACKSON, Dr Robert, President, Australian Council of TESOL Associations

[16:40]

CHAIR: I welcome the next witness here today. Thank you for your submission. Do you wish to make a brief introductory statement before we proceed to questions?

Dr Jackson : I do have a prepared opening statement that I would like to read to you.

The Australian Council of TESOL Associations, or ACTA, is the peak body for the teaching of English to speakers of other languages, or TESOL, in Australia. Our submission to the standing committee inquiry into language learning in Indigenous communities and this presentation were compiled by members from our constituent state and territory associations who possess expertise in the field of English language and literacy education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, and they have the endorsement of those associations.

ACTA firmly supports the objectives outlined in the Australian government's Indigenous languages—a national approach document and the goals of the national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education policy. ACTA acknowledges the importance for all Australians of protecting our rich cultural heritage, and particularly the cultures and languages of our first peoples.

In order to achieve these objectives and goals, ACTA makes the following recommendations. One: teachers, schools and educational jurisdictions at all levels must formally recognise and acknowledge the actual home language backgrounds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. The majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in Australian schools speak a variety of Aboriginal English, an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander creole, one or more traditional heritage languages or any combination of these as their home language.

Currently, in many situations where students speak a variety of Aboriginal English and/or an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander creole as their home language, this language or language variety is unnamed or unidentified and thus goes unrecognised by schools and education authorities. It is assumed, incorrectly, that the student's home language is English. Students are often subjected to unsuitable instruction or methodologies and inappropriate referrals for educational remediation as a result.

Two: timely and effective consultation with representatives from all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and groups within the particular community or context must be sought in order to inform the development and implementation of educational strategies and language education programs in schools. The recognition and active involvement of members of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities at all levels of educational decision making are crucial to the enhancement of education policies and programs for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people in Australia. Teachers and principals should go beyond the classroom and the school in seeking to engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, as invited and appropriate, to find out about language maintenance and revitalisation initiatives, and to incorporate these into their educational curricula.

Three: education authorities and institutions at national, state and local levels must adopt a strategic and thoroughgoing approach to the teaching of standard Australian English to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students who speak a traditional or heritage language, a creole or a variety of Aboriginal English as their home language. These students are learners of English as an additional language or dialect—or EALD. Bilingual, multilingual, bidialectal and TESOL education programs and initiatives should be developed, reinstated and/or consolidated and appropriately resourced to ensure effective implementation and maintenance of these programs where there is community support for their operation. These programs acknowledge students' home languages and allow students to continue their learning in a language they understand while they are learning academic English for schooling. Schools should meet the learning needs of speakers of Australian languages, creoles and dialects, to have their bilingual, multilingual and bidialectal development supported through researched and established pedagogies for additional language learning. Four: the training and employment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander principals, teachers and educational aids in schools and the appointment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander personnel at all levels within educational jurisdictions are essential. As well as bringing linguistic and cultural knowledge to the educational context, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander educators in schools provide positive role models for students and support links to the community or communities.

Five: accurate understanding and reporting of the diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language backgrounds is crucial to any plan to improve educational outcomes for these students. There is no one-size-fits-all approach—no easy solution. Distinctive, differentiated and expert second-language pedagogies and assessment programs are required to meet the needs of those Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students who are learning standard Australian English as an additional language or dialect. Similarly, distinctive, differentiated and expert language education programs are required to support the revival and maintenance of traditional and heritage Indigenous languages. In many situations, and particularly in those situations where the Indigenous language is critically endangered and/or students' home languages are varieties of Aboriginal English and/or Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Creoles, a three-way approach is required.

Six: language revival projects and programs for the revitalisation, renewal and reclamation of traditional or heritage Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages must have high expectations and aim for linguistic proficiency and communicative fluency. One of the long-term objectives of such programs should be the capacity to provide mother-tongue education to students alongside English-language instruction. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have the same right as any other people to receive instruction in their own language, and this right is enshrined in a number of United Nations declarations, to which Australia is a signatory. Many active Indigenous languages exist in Australia, and the academic development of bilingual and multilingual students depends on the formal use of students' home languages, along with English, in learning programs.

We thank the standing committee for this opportunity and would be pleased to collaborate further in the planning, development and implementation of programs and strategies which will assist educators to continue to bridge the gap for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in Australia.

CHAIR: Thank you very much. We appreciate your very detailed submission. I was extremely impressed by it. It really is a very good submission. I take it that, Dr Jackson, you either wrote it or were instrumental with the team that actually did it. It is terrific.

Dr Jackson : Absolutely. My background and area of expertise is not in this area, so I am very heavily reliant on the expertise that we have in our state and territory association.

CHAIR: Could you please pass on our thanks to those people involved. I thought it was a terrific submission.

Dr Jackson : Thank you. I will do.

CHAIR: I am very interested in a comment you made. It was about identifying which particular Indigenous language is being taught in a particular area. You mentioned Creole, and Dr Stone has mentioned it. It seems to be an amalgam of different things, but your comment was about identifying which particular language was spoken in a particular area. Do you have any pearls of wisdom for us in order to look at that? It is a very difficult issue. There are different groupings. In my electorate, there are the Children of the Dreaming. I have the Jagera, Yuggera, Ugarapul people in my area. I have seen maps of Australia with the different groups. It is a very complex mosaic of groups. Identifying which particular group speaks which particular language in which particular location is difficult, so I am interested in hearing what you have to say about that. You raised the issue in your report, in your submission, and you have rested here again today.

Dr Jackson : Absolutely. One of the points that we need to keep coming back to is that there is an absolute diversity of language backgrounds. Going back to the traditional languages, obviously there are particular geographical locations where the language groups were originally spoken, but the history of settlement of Australia has meant that a lot of those traditional language geographical areas are broken up. So you will have situations in remote and very remote places where perhaps the language groups are consistent with some of those maps that you are speaking of. In other situations, because of the removal of Aboriginal people to missions or to stations—

CHAIR: Are you talking about migration—forced migration or voluntary migration?

Dr Jackson : Forced migration, certainly. You will have a situation where those people have been dislocated from their traditional lands and their traditional languages and cultures. What will happen in those situations is that Creoles or other varieties of contact language will arise. The distinction that we make is between the contact languages, in which we include varieties of Aboriginal English—and there are light varieties in very strong varieties of Aboriginal English. Each of those ends of the particular spectrums require different approaches. There will be what we call mixed languages. That is a couple of languages like Warlpiri and Gurindji in the middle of the Northern Territory, where the creolisation has undergone a subsequent creolisation where a traditional language has come in and again the language is shifting more towards that particular traditional language. So there is another step in that process of creolisation.

What we also find in many places—in the Far North and Cape York in Queensland—is that students will come to school and they will have 20 different main languages other than English as their home language or their first language. They might present at school with that sort of language. In other places—Yarrabah just south of Cairns—a creole will have developed, so people in that particular community will speak an unnamed creole; it is just the talk or the lingo that the people speak. If you need to name it is Yarrie Lingo. That is a creole and it is quite distinct from standard Australian English.

So in terms of recognising, identifying and going in and finding out what language is being spoken in a particular community or context, you cannot really go in with a preconception of what might be there; you really actually need local solutions. You need expert people in there to identify, because often the communities themselves will not have that linguistic expertise to be able to elaborate or to identify the language stem or stems in that particular community.

CHAIR: Then how do we then recognise and value what you have described as the 'home language' of ATSIA students? That is the expression used in your report.

Mr Jackson : Absolutely.

CHAIR: How do we do that? We have had evidence previously that it is worse up in the Torres Strait, where there is just a kaleidoscope of language. We have had evidence from numerous people giving submissions. How do we do that? It might be different in a settled community like mine, which has a large Indigenous community on the south-west of the Brisbane River, where there are three distinct groups and everyone knows there are three distinct groups. How do we sort the problem out of identification, value and then go in and sort it out, if I can put it like that? Perhaps that is a male thing—sort out solutions. How do we identify? How do we do that in places like Cape York?

Mr Jackson : There are two parts to that question. Pedagogically when a student presents at school you recognise and value the language or the talk that that student brings. You don't have to name it to actually recognise that that student is speaking a different variety or dialect of English in the classroom. For you to try to continually butt your head against the wall and try and teach that student using the same pedagogical principles that you would for a native English speaker is not going to work. In that very microcosmic sense you need to recognise and value the language that the individual student brings to the school.

Now you have identified situations where there perhaps are monolingual students—a group of monolingual students coming into the school. Another example would be Areyonga School west of Alice Springs, where the language background that students bring to the school is Pitjantjatjara and it is a common language that the students share. So the pedagogical strategy that the teacher can implement in those schools is a bilingual program of education where you can actually use the students' first language because all the students are speaking in the same first language.

In this situation you alluded to in the Torres Strait and in the Far North and Cape, the students are coming in with different language backgrounds, as you have identified. For teaching to our Australian Curriculum, standard Australian English is the target language. In those situations you would adopt TESOL pedagogies, ESL pedagogies—so the pedagogies we use in intensive English settings, for example, in Sydney. Where they are available you would have teachers aides, ethnic aides, bilingual speakers of particular language or the main language groups. You would be using whatever resources that you could.

CHAIR: Could you tell us about those support materials. I will stop asking questions and hand over to Dr Stone. But tell us about the assistance, not just the assistance that the local people might be able to provide but the support materials that are available in that very complex—my expression was—'kaleidoscope' of languages?

Tell us about the materials that are available. Have we got enough? Are they sufficient? What is your expert comment on what we are providing? Queensland particularly, and New South Wales and the other states would have the same.

Dr Jackson : I am aware of some very good resources that have been produced, but they are being produced for local solutions, local communities. My examples are drawn from a very organised departmental program in New South Wales, the intensive English centres, and they are quite well resourced with picture dictionaries; bilingual dictionaries; ethnic teaching aids, as I mentioned; bilingual support materials—stories that are written in both languages. Again, with a lot of Aboriginal students you are looking at a language that does not have a print form, a written form. That is another overlay. You need to then transcribe the language, have a written version of the language, and then get the student used to the idea that language occurs both in an oral form and in a print-based form. That is another step.

The TESOL pedagogies that you would implement are strategic. They are sequential, so there are certain stages that you would need to go through. The oral language precedes the written language. You would use the students' oral language and teach them the target language by bilingual methods—by showing body parts or realia around the classroom or taking them out and talking about: 'What's the word you use for this? In Standard Australian English this is a tree. What's your word?' That is the sort of pedagogy at the very early stage. Obviously, the pedagogy changes as the students acquire more of the target language, whether it be English or the traditional language.

The other issue that I think is a really difficult one—and it is not one that I have an answer for; I put it back to this inquiry—is: in those communities, where there is such a diversity of language groups and communities and cultures that have come together, what is the Indigenous language? Who decides what Indigenous language you are going to teach? What is going to be the target language in those areas? One of the people who fed into our submission said that logically it should be the language of the place. The language of the place is not always going to be the language that the people in the community speak, but as a starting point perhaps that is a logical answer. That certainly is a question.

Dr STONE: Yes. I think, Dr Jackson, you are right in saying that whose language is going to have the status as the school's language or the preeminent language in that small place where, except for a very small group of traditional owners, they are all resettled people—places like Arionga or Haasts Bluff—becomes very political, and then you further exacerbate community tensions if you pick winners of languages and say, 'Yours is important—more important than ours' and so on. It is a very vexed area, as you are implying.

I think your submission is excellent in that you fully acknowledge the business of Aboriginal English—of different dialects, of the contact languages as well the heritage or traditional languages and the need for us to have an understanding that whatever language a child brings to school they are going to learn best having that home language as the foundation for their other learning. That is such a critical point, which is new to most Australians, I think. We have imagined the best thing we can do for a child is to start them off the day they arrive at school in English. Tragically, it seems to us, we have had a lot of evidence about the Northern Territory move away from bilingual education to this other principle or program they have where we have to wonder just what their objectives are in beginning again with English-only for those numbers of hours.

Have you got a view of how we are going to change each state and territory's approach to teacher education? It seems to me that it is not just Indigenous language differences in Australia; it is all our refugees, our migrant children and so on. Do you think there is any value in having embedded in every teacher education experience, from the first year to three or four years, as most teacher trainees do now, some language training, whether it is TESOL or ESL, so that wherever they end up teaching in a school—whether they encounter a new refugee group or an Indigenous group—they at least have the basic tools to move forward without further damaging those children's capacities to learn?

Dr Jackson : Absolutely. I think that is an essential ingredient. I know that a lot of teacher training programs have electives or compulsory units within their teacher training credentials focusing on ESL and multicultural education. We have worked closely with ACARA and ATSIL. We have developed with ACARA and EALD support document for the Australian curriculum F to 10, which is geared towards mainstream teachers. You have a lot of mainstream teachers in schools at the moment teaching Indigenous students, refugee students and migrant students who are, perhaps, invisible in the classroom. Those teachers certainly need support.

You have a lot of situations where the staff, the teaching resources, the specialist teachers are not available. So mainstream teachers have to jump in at the deep end and address the learning needs of these students. That is one area where we have worked quite closely with the Australian government to produce materials which will support mainstream, non-specialist teachers.

The ideal is obviously to have a specialist teacher or a teacher who has had part of their teacher training devoted to ESL methodology and TESOL pedagogy. Initially for Indigenous students there is another factor required. Before the teacher is appointed to a rural or remote school, or a school where there are large numbers of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander students, there is another step. It might be a refresher on language particular to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities—you were talking about the differences between the contact languages and the traditional languages and how that might play out in the classroom—and it might also cover some of the cultural factors. The Western Australian bidialectal model—and the teacher training that goes around that model—does that very well.

Dr STONE: What is that called?

Dr Jackson : It is bidialectal.

Dr STONE: I do not think we have heard about that particular program yet. You are saying that an ESL type of exposure during teacher training would be very good but you need extra inservicing for those who are actually going to remote communities where they are absolutely going to experience students with a different cultural perspective as well as a different language.

Dr Jackson : I think that would be the optimum.

Dr STONE: Can you comment, then, on NAPLAN? I do not know whether you were here when we spoke about a submission which referred to the problems NAPLAN introduces in not taking on board students who have English as a second, third or fourth language—they may be Indigenous students but the expectation is that one size will fit all—and then what follows from poor NAPLAN results for that school.

The datasets from NAPLAN—the LBOTE datasets—do not reflect English language proficiency. They reflect the parents' or the grandparents' first language. Often the LBOTE bubble will be coloured in and the students may be monolingual, standard Australian English speakers—native speakers. So the datasets that are captured through that LBOTE bubble are not reflective of students' stages of English language development. The feedback I have had from Queensland is that schools are very confused about whether to identify as LBOTE, as non-English-speaking or as English-speaking. So the data that people from NAPLAN and My School are getting is faulty. Some schools are saying, 'Everyone, colour-in that bubble; you're all LBOTE.' Other schools say, 'No, we're going to steer well clear of this.' So there is a lot of confusion out there about whether to identify or what to identify.

We would say that you would need to identify specifically what languages are spoken in the school. If a student, as their home language, speaks a variety of Aboriginal English, a creole or a traditional language then certainly they are in a different category to speakers of standard Australian English as a first language.

Within ACTA we would categorise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students into two groups: those who have standard Australian English as their first language and those who are learners of English as an additional language or dialect. You will find that there is probably about a fifty-fifty mixture of those two groups across Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia. Again, do not quote me on that statistic, but there will be significant numbers in both of those groups. We just do not have the statistics; we just cannot capture that information as we are set up at present. It would be lovely to have that information.

Dr STONE: So you can imagine the teachers' dilemma at an outback school where there is no capacity for them on the forms to identify that our children are Aboriginal English speakers and therefore should be considered differently in their NAPLAN results than standard English speakers. I can understand the dilemma for them, but therefore we are getting data which is not being helpful to anybody, because it is not reflecting the realities of these kids' languages.

Dr Jackson : Absolutely, yes.

Mrs GRIGGS: Earlier you were talking about communities where multiple languages are spoken and working out with is their chosen language to learn in. Do you have some examples of communities where there are multiple languages spoken and they have been effective at picking one or two or three languages and putting them in schools?

Dr Jackson : I think that Tagai State College in the Torres Strait have taken that approach. I am not sure that everyone is absolutely happy with the languages they have chosen, but they have certainly had a good go at it and, as Mr Neumann mentioned, the Torres Strait is one of those areas where there is a huge variety and diversity of languages spoken.

Mrs GRIGGS: So what has made that successful?

Dr Jackson : I think that, again, it is the community support for it, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people themselves in the school. You have very good links between the community and the school; you have good communication and good funding and resourcing. That particular school has been picked up as a lighthouse school.

Mrs GRIGGS: Are there any examples in the Northern Territory or in WA?

Dr Jackson : Northern Territory is a little bit different because you are looking largely at that divide between the bilingual programs in schools and schools which have perhaps had to adopt or have always adopted standard Australian English as their main medium of instruction. So, no, I cannot give you any examples of that.

Again, it is the diversity across Australia. I think that in Western Australia one of the schools that I did a little bit of research on for our submission was the Moorditj Noongar Community College just out of Perth. They have very effectively adopted a three-way approach. The majority of the students of the school will bring a variety of Aboriginal English to the school, and the Noongar language is the target Indigenous language, but there is also standard Australian English. So it is that three-way model that has worked very effectively at that school.

Mrs GRIGGS: So you think that those two schools are effective?

Dr Jackson : Absolutely, yes.

CHAIR: Thank you, Dr Jackson.

Dr Jackson : Thanks for the opportunity.