that munanga linguist

I'm a bit excited. I have a new job which I'm enjoying quite a bit. It's only my fourth week, but all signs are good. When I started, I had to go to Alice Springs where I had a week of teaching the basics of phonology to 12 Indigenous students from all over Qld and NSW. It was daunting, challenging, exciting, exhausting and best of all - it went well. Since then, I've been settling into my new office in Katherine and preparing for a semester of teaching. I'll be running weeklong workshops about every second week to different groups, but the training I'll be delivering is not too different from what I used to do at Ngukurr - a lot of Indigenous Language Literacy training. Which I enjoy a lot. And I'm excited for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I'm excited because I get to deliver workshops at Ngukurr with all the language mob I used to work with there. It will be so nice going back and it will be so nice to work with that mob while I'm all fres...

The other day, I was priveleged in attending a TESOL symposium about 'Keeping Language Diversity Alive'. One of the speakers, Joseph Lo Bianco was excellent and discussed Language Policy. He gave a handout at one of his sessions that I'm going to type out in full here, because it was a real eye-opener. It's from the Official Hansard of the Federal Parliament from a debate that happened on 10/12/98. Here's how it went: Mr SNOWDON: My question is to the Prime Minister. Is the Prime Minister aware of the decision by the Northern Territory government to phase out bilingual education in Aboriginal schools? Is the Prime Minister also aware that his government funds bilingual education programs in Papua New Guinea and Vietnam? Prime Minister, given that article 26(3) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children, will you take a direct approach to the Norther...

The other day an interesting message came through the Australian Linguistic Society email server. It's from Gavan Breen and talks about the problem of miscommunication between Aboriginal people who have English as a second language and English speakers, especially public servants. It's a huge problem that I'm well aware of and Gavan is talking about getting the issue out there or doing some research. Here's a copy of Gavan's post: I and some others here at the Institute for Aboriginal Development think there is a need for a study to be done of how well Aboriginal English speakers, especially those who speak it as a second or later language, understand the English of whitefellows, especially public servants and politicians and the like. The latest inspiration for this is a news item: Report finds NT Aboriginal group doesn't understand legal terms However, there was an earlier discussion of this sort of thing, related to the inability of public servants to exp...