Did anyone else watch Four Corners last night?
It was about poor English literacy standards and education in remote Indigenous communities, focussing on Nguiu on Bathurst Island. The elders there have decided to set up their own weekly boarding school on the island, to simultaneously address the issues of attendance at the local Two-Way school (which the report paints as a being due to a combination of lack of will on the students' part to attend, and disrupted home-life due to substance abuse and over-crowding) and the drop-out rate for those who go to away to boarding schools in Darwin or further afield. It is an English-only high school which is far away from the community itself, and students are required to sign a contract stating they will not bring drugs or alcohol to the campus.
For me, the saddest and most powerful part of the story was the children themselves saying how they didn't feel safe at home (especially when they weren't being led to such statements by the journalist, Sarah Ferguson), and that going to the boarding school was a welcome break from the chaos at home.
Equally affecting was the news that the boarding school is struggling to maintain attendance. The very mechanism set up to address non-attendance and dropping-out is itself unable to get over the first hurdle.
But, this is a language blog, and there were certainly some important language issues discussed in the story - though they were dealt with fairly lightly, and conclusions drawn fairly quickly, in my view. Bilingual education got this summary (from the transcript, all the teachers are from the local school, not the boarding school):
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LEONARD FREEMAN, BILINGUAL TEACHER: You can’t write a language unless you can speak it. So by learning their first language they understand how to make meanings, how to construct sentences, then they transfer those skills to English.
SARAH FERGUSON: In recent years the whole issue of bilingual teaching has become a contentious debate in the culture wars.
PROFESSOR HELEN HUGHES, CENTRE FOR INDEPENDENT STUDIES: You have to make the children learn something. I mean, drop the separate curriculum. There is a sort of possum hunting curriculum. They’re supposed to be taught in local languages but none of the teachers who can teach can speak the local language, and those who can speak the local language can’t teach.
SARAH FERGUSON: But before the argument about bilingual teaching can be resolved the schools have a more pressing problem: getting the kids through the door.
SARAH FERGUSON (to Rodd Plummer): What is the biggest obstacle you face teaching in that classroom?
RODD PLUMMER: It's attendance. It's really significant. Those kids that actually come every day or, you know, four to five days a week, they’re the kids that are doing really well. And those kids that are not coming to school are the ones that are struggling.
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Now, Jane Simpson has already taken on Helen Hughes, so we'll just take it as given that it is important for children to learn about basic concepts about literacy and numeracy in a language they understand, and leave Helen Hughes to the side. Rodd Plummer says that the good-attenders at the local school are achieving. It is their regular attendance which is the important contributing factor here, in spite of/as well as the bilingual program.
Somehow, the "learning Tiwi = not learning English (literacy)" mantra has taken hold and become the scapegoat for the poor education outcomes for students at Nguiu:
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SARAH FERGUSON: After more than four decades of good intentions and bad outcomes in the schools, the Tiwi elders decided they had to act to save their children.
Their solution was to ask the former Federal government to build a boarding school on the Tiwi islands, but far away from Nguiu.
BERNARD TIPILOURA, TIWI EDUCATION BOARD: Because they would have good sleep, they would have three meals a day, they would have better teachers, qualified teachers to learn, and no bilingual, we said English only.
(and from one of the students at the boarding school:)
KEISHA VIGONA: I like Nguiu but I don’t like the schools. I was there for year seven but I didn’t learn a bit more because there was too much Tiwi. English is way better than Tiwi because you get to communicate to people, to white people, and to apply at job and all that.
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I fear that the attendance issues already attested for the boarding school will mean that it will also struggle to achieve good literacy for its students. Only this time, there won't be a bilingual program to blame. And with attitudes like those of Keisha Vigona's, maybe there won't be much spoken Tiwi either.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
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10 comments:
Isn't it engaging and relevant curriculum that gets kids to attend school if parental pressure isn't there? Was there any discussion of how the Two-way curriculum was implemented?
To me, if the home language is only being taught as a means to English, that's not really respecting the language or culture, is it?
I'd like to see a community discussion about what people want the outcome of public education to be. When it comes down to it, I think parents, students, teachers, and govt often each have really different ideas of what they think school is "for."
It's a thorny topic; thanks for bringing it up.
I don't think my comment was clear. What I think I'm trying to say is
(a) it's sad that the bilingual approach would be thrown out or blamed for non-success without a deeper investigation of how it was really taught.
(b) How things are taught and why (not just what) influence students' attitudes about school.
(c) Everyone talks about wanting students to get an education, but I don't think people are really agreeing on what that means.
I decided to play a drinking game, taking a shot every time a child's reading age was mentioned...so I was too drunk to read your blog and then too hung over to write a response. Now i've recovered enough to say that there is very little in the way of research into second language acquisition in contexts relative to the Tiwi Islands, and nothing in the way of benchmarking for reading ability in a second language. It is therefore fallacious to describe a child's reading ability in an L2 in terms of benchmarks achieved by monolingual L1 learners. I'm sure the bilingual teacher at the primary school (featured for all of about 10 seconds) could have explained that had he been given the chance. Finding teachers who are trained and experienced in multilingual education is difficult, considering Australia sees these skills as 'specialist' (if not remedial) in nature. Strangely enough Helen Hughes summed up the root of the problem when she said something like 'those who can teach, can't talk Tiwi, and those who can talk Tiwi can't teach'. Well there's your solution: train native speakers to teach, and train teachers from outside in Tiwi.
Thanks Catalin - I think you raise some really interesting issues. I didn't go anywhere near the issue of 'inclusive classrooms attract students'. I think that one is easily targetted by detractors who will cite low attendance at bilingual schools as evidence that this doesn't hold true. Though, of course, (and I think you're saying this) the more important question is how is the bilingual program being taught/supported/resourced?
And your point about 'what do all the interested parties think school/education is for' is right on the money. Did you ever have conversations about this in Katherine which are worthy of being recounted here?
And, Sally, I couldn't agree more wrt measuring L1 vs L2 literacy and actually calling it that. The high school principal actually spoke quite passionately about this issue (maybe you were slurring your hearing by this stage?! :))
And are you really being so radical as to suggest that white teachers learn the first language as their Indigenous students??? Whatever next, a mandarin-speaking PM? Oh, wait...
Yeah she said they weren't dumb, but she also said that the kids' English is "approximately grade four level" when they arrive at the high school. This is precisely the kind of comment that turned me to the drink ;)
Sally's point about talking about "English levels" with regard to grade-level norms of L1ers vs. L2ers is important. I, of course, didn't see the show, but I'm curious...were they also conflating oral language fluency with written language?
As for the different goals of different stake-holders in public education, it's a topic that I've been thinking about since I was there. I never had an explicit conversation about it, but began to really think about it in relation to the language programs that were facilitated by the Language Centre.
As an ESL teacher, I have had a strong sense of the importance of helping students acquire/learn oral language and useful practical everyday language. The emphasis on word-lists, especially the strong orientation towards nouns, within the school programs, frustrated me. The language speaker did not seem very concerned to get kids talking, but just wanted to make sure they could identify every kind of fish, bird, etc.
It slowly dawned on me that the speakers' idea of success was different from mine. They were most concerned with the knowledge embedded in the language and the identity that came with that knowledge. Who cared if the kids couldn't talk about everyday events? Didn't they already have Kriol (and English) to do that? The thing was to learn the language words for things that really matter.
This was my (eventual) interpretation of a couple of speakers' attitudes. I'm sure it's not universal, but it definitely made me think about what all the different involved people might really think about what language programs are for.
Catalin,
I reckon you've pretty much got it right.
My tactic was to get the language teachers to use everyday language *while* they taught the important nouns ... so it just sneaks up on the students. Then both goals are being met and everyone's happy. heheheh...
As always, I agree strongly with you, Sally, and I particularly admire your strategy of dealing with the monotonous and sadly predictable "reading age" tag. I had to call my partner and rant after seeing that. Is it really that difficult to value a language which isn't English and a way of life that isn't the mainstream?
What also got me was the ignorant way the interviewer described the turtle hunting like a "family outing" and asked that one "elusive" young man "So why is it important for you to come back for funerals and things like that?" I could be wrong of course, and I'm probably being oversensitive, but still...
This programme was so skewed, you could throw it away at a particular angle/elevation and it'd come back.
This is my first ever post like this, by the way. V.exciting. Hope it works.
Hey Adriano,
Thanks for your comment, and welcome!
I thought the program was a strong example of 'whitefella just arrived in Aboriginal community, somewhat uneasy in the situation yet determined to do her job, while trying to make sense of everything by explaining it to an external audience'.
I should know, my early group emails after arriving in Katherine smacked of this! Hopefully posting on this blog has moved away from that genre, unless I'm deliberately and ironically recalling it!
What I found particularly ironic about this whole program was that none of the interviewers seemed to notice that their interviewees were all talking fairly standard English, despite supposedly not being able to.
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