Educational failure or success: Aboriginal children’s non-standard English utterances

Dixon, Sally

doi:10.1075/aral.36.3.05dix

Article published In: Teaching Creole-Speaking Children: Issues, concerns and resolutions for the classroom
Edited by Gillian Wigglesworth
[Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 36:3] 2013
► pp. 302–315

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Educational failure or success

Aboriginal children’s non-standard English utterances

Sally Dixon | School of Language Studies, The Australian National University

Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 1 January 2013

https://doi.org/10.1075/aral.36.3.05dix

Within the Australian education system, Aboriginal students’ use of non-standard English features is often viewed simplistically as evidence of non-attainment of literacy and oral-English milestones. One reason for this is the widespread use of assessment tools which fail to differentiate between native- English speakers and students who are learning English as a second language. In these assessments, non-standard English features are framed as ‘mistakes’ and low scores taken as evidence of ‘poor’ performance. This paper will contrast a mistake-oriented analysis with one that incorporates knowledge of the students’ first language. It will clearly show that when consideration is given to the first language, a more nuanced picture of English proficiency emerges: one that is attuned to the specific second language learning pathway and thus far better placed to inform both assessment and classroom instruction.ⁱ

Keywords: Alyawarr English, Assessment, ESL, Education, Mixed Languages

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