"English is way better than Tiwi"

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.

Field sessions in review

I love watching the Dalabon recordings we've made. They're pretty much all on video, so indeed I watch (as well as listen). Apart from all the wonderful language content, and material for analysis, I find looking at these recordings to be a really transporting experience. It takes me back to the session when we made the recording, and, more often than not, I realise more of what was going on in the interaction than I was cognisant of at the time. I also cringe a lot at

a) my laugh,
b) what I perceive as being inappropriate laughter on my part,
c) the poor timing of my questions (I often realise later in the watching that I've cut off a speaker just as they were about to say something probably highly insightful),
d) my language errors, and
e) poorly-thought-out elicitation strategies.

But what I like most about watching these recordings is the humour, and the human-ness of the interactions. Like just now I'm transcribing one, where I'd probably pushed the session longer than any of us could really cope with. It comes up in lots of improvised interactions which are about 'giving up' and being short tempered! These are met with rousing laughter each time :)

The length of the session also shows up in my contributions. The Dalabon expression for talking on the phone is:

Ngah-yang-birdihka fon
1sg>3-word-enter phone
'I'm speaking on the phone (lit. 'I'm entering my words into the phone')'

I tried to elicit a sentence to do with the use of demonstratives (modifying the nominal fon), and wasn't paying much attention to the rest of the sentence. I said:

Ngah-birdihk-iyan kanh fon
1sg>3-enter-FUT that phone
'(lit. 'I will enter that phone')'

LB patiently explained what I'd said - in a mock school teacher voice - and then tried to mime me taking to the person on the other end of the line from inside the phone! We all fell about laughing. Shortly afterwards we called it a day - and not a moment too soon!

Mock Hindi?

Are the photos below an example of clever messaging, or a racist use of orthography?

Jane Hill writes about white racist use of Spanish (for example, in the States), particularly for humourous effect. She describes this use as racist (particularly when erroneous, e.g. No problemo (correct form: no problema)) as it relies on the hearer being able to recall racist stereotypes in order to find the use of language humorous. She calls this use of language Mock Spanish. I'm really interested in the version of this (Mock Kriol) which is often heard spoken by whitefellas in or around Aboriginal communities in Australia - especially the Kriol-speaking context I am familiar with.

But I digress. These photos are of ads in a Melbourne tram. They are part of a campaign to reduce fare evasion. They appeal to an understanding of karma, and are written in a roman font which approximates Devanagari. It also strikes me that the word order is also Mock Hindi, though I'm not an expert on Hindi word order. What do you think?

Update on The Linguists on DVD

I received the following in response to an enquiry re: the availability and release of DVDs of the movie The Linguists.

Thank you so much for your continued interest in THE LINGUISTS (formerly called The Last Speakers). We are currently developing a distribution plan for the movie. My hope is that we’ll establish a US television broadcast date within the next few months, and that DVDs will be available for purchase by the end of 2008.

I will happily keep you posted as things progress.

Yours,
Seth


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Seth Kramer
Ironbound Films, Inc.
PO Box 441
Garrison, New York 10524
Office (845) 424-3700
Cell (973) 615-3985
kramer@ironboundfilms.com
www.ironboundfilms.com


Note the shift from the original title The Last Speakers to The Linguists. Not only does that seem much more appropriate, given it is the linguists who appear to be the protagonists (i.e. it is a story about them and what they do, more than it is about the last speakers of the various languages they study), it seems to be a more-marketable title. Any thoughts?