Aboriginal English in the Ciassroom: An

Asset or a Liabiiity?
Farzad Sharifian
Monash University, School of Languages, Cultures, and Linguistics,
Faculty of Arts, Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia

This paper discusses issues surrounding the use of Australian Aboriginal English in
the classroom in the light of a recent survey. Aboriginal English is often correlated
with low academic performance and poor school attendance. The paper argues that
in any discussion of the school role of students' home talk, a range of factors need to
be examined, including the relationship between language, identity, power, emotion
and cultural conceptualisations. Students' home dialect can be viewed as an asset at
school on various grounds.

doi: 10.2167/la436.0

Keywords: non-standard dialects in education. Aboriginal English, second di-

alect education, bi-dialectal education.

Introduction
Indigenous Australians have largely been disadvantaged in the education
system for various reasons, including their home dialect (Aboriginal English).
A recent survey (Zubrick et al, 2006) has presented confronting evidence of the
failvire of the education system in Western Australia to improve the educational
outcomes of the vast majority of Aboriginal school children. While the survey
should, in general, be lauded for presenting a challenge for the education system,
I propose caveats relating to how Aboriginal English may be linked to school
attendance and academic performance.
Zubrick et al. state that '57% of Aboriginal students have low academic perfor-
mance compared with 19% of non-Aboriginal students - a disparity of 38 per-
centage points' (p. 26 in volume 3, summary booklet). It also maintains that 'no
obvious progress has been made over the last thirty years to effectively close
the disparities in academic performance' (p. 2). The survey found relationships
between the academic performance of Aboriginal children and issues, such as
poor school attendance, levels of education of the primary carer, students' level
of risk of clinically sigrüficant emotional or behavioural difficulties and trouble
getting enough sleep. One factor included in the survey and correlated with aca-
demic performance and school attendance, is the language or language variety
of the Aboriginal children. The survey observes that students speaking Aborig-
inal English or an Aboriginal language were more likely than other students to
miss school (p. 113) and show lower levels of academic performance (p. 248).
The former also extends to those whose primary carer spoke Aboriginal English

0965-8416/08/02131-08 $20.00/0 © 2008 R Sharifian

LANGUAGE AWARENESS Vol. 17, No. 2,2008

131
132 Language Awareness

(p. 132); those whose carers spoke Aboriginal English or an Aboriginal language
were more likely to be absent from school.
From these observations, the siirvey made the following recommendation:
Substantial direction within the education system is now needed to target
'explicit teaching of standard Australian English language features throughout
all years at school', (p. 498)
The observations above imply that Aboriginal English is a problem at school.
It seems somehow related to poor school attendance and poor academic perfor-
mance. But how? What is the causal link? Various links can be claimed, leading
to different conclusions and recommendations. Statistics, such as correlations
and regressions are one matter, but interpreting them is another. The dangers of
inferring causal relationships from correlations are well documented.
On the one hand, it can be argued that speaking Aboriginal English within the
school hinders the progress of Aboriginal students' literacy skills in standard
Australian English (SAE), which then decreases motivation to attend school.
A possible recommendation would then be to discourage or ban Aboriginal
English at school and focus on the explicit teaching of SAE. This is implied in
the report on the survey in The Australian newspaper (Bank, 2006) : 'English needs
to be adequately taught to Aboriginal students to break the cycle of academic
failure, chronic absenteeism and low retention rates'. It continues:

The report identified language as a major barrier to improving education,

finding that students who used "Aboriginal English" in the classroom -
an adapted language that uses different sentence structures and meanings
and employs some traditional words - were more than twice as likely to
be rated low in academic performance as students who spoke Australian
English. The report urges language programs to be provided for indige-
nous students from kindergarten and preschool, and argues for the com-
pulsory and explicit teaching of standard Australian English throughout
all years at school.

A second way of linking the use of Aboriginal English to poor academic per-
formance and school attendance is to view the school as failing to recogrüse Abo-
riginal English as a legitimate English dialect or even dismissing it as 'incorrect'
English, which can then threaten the identity of Aboriginal English-speaking
students, decreasing their motivation to attend school. In other words, students
speaking Aboriginal English may believe 'the school is not respecting my home
language, which is part of me and my identity, so school is not about me'. In
this second scenario, a possible recommendation is to encourage the school to
acknowledge the home language/dialect of students, while empowering them
further by teaching them SAE. This does not mean simply saying to students,
'Your language/dialect is fine and I respect it, but keep it for outside the school',
but that they be given opportunities to use their dialect appropriately at school,
at least initially, for example, in developing bi-dialectal materials. This would
help them understand and notice the differences and similarities between their
first dialect and SAE. Research in second language acquisition suggests that
conscious 'noticing' of the features of the language to be learned facilitates the
process of acquisition (e.g. Schmidt, 1990). In second dialect learning, as Siegel
Aboriginal English In the Classroom 133

(2006: 60) maintains, making comparisons between learners' first and second
dialect is likely to help students notice features of the second dialect that are
different from those of the first.
Elbow (2006: x) refers to the position above as build on strength, maintaining
that 'when teachers want to help students get control of the prestige mainstream
variety of English, they will do best by building on the sophisticated linguistic
command of their home language that all students bring to the classroom'. He
continues that 'it is possible for teachers to build on this rich linguistic strength
in order to help them attain command over the standard variety'.
The above discussion is not to suggest that teachers should learn to speak the
students' first dialect, but they can help students bring the knowledge of their
first dialect into conscious focus and make comparisons with features of the sec-
ond dialect. The training for teachers likely to be teaching Aboriginal English
speakers should include raising their awareness of the students' home dialect.
Teachers can facilitate students' learning of SAE, if they know which areas of
SAE are significantly different from Aboriginal English. Aboriginal English em-
ploys a large number of words that exist in SAE, but with different meanings
and connotations. Teachers would need to be able to bring at least, some of
tivem to their students' attention as a precaution against miscommunication.
Eor example, the reference and deixis system in Aboriginal English is signifi-
cantly different from that of SAE. In Aboriginal English, the use of referential
and deictic devices assumes a great deal of shared knowledge on the part of
participants in a conversation (see Sharifian, 2001). Teachers would need to be
aware of such differences and place emphasis on them in their teaching, to avoid
the assumption that the two dialects operate similarly in such areas.
Schools need to acknowledge and highlight that the Aboriginal children's
home dialect and SAE would be used for different purposes. Aboriginal English
mainly serves the purpose of intra-cultural comnwmication, while SAE would
priniarily be used for inter-cultural communication with other non-Aboriginal
Australians. Students would need to develop this kind of awareness, rather
than being urged not to speak Aboriginal English at school. Otherwise, students
might ask themselves, why they should learn another English when they already
speak it, and further question their own English usage, especially if they feel
they do not 'possess' the new dialect.
The existence of Aboriginal English at school, then, should be considered an
asset. Depending on the level of the students, teachers can draw on the rela-
tionship between Aboriginal English and SAE to teach issues of language and
power, or take examples from Aboriginal English to teach language variation.

ESL versus SAESD

Learning English as a Second Language (ESL) is different from learning SAE
as a Second Dialect (SAESD) in many respects, including motivation and iden-
tity. In the former, learners do not usually feel any threat to their LI, unless the
L2 is meant to replace their LI. In learriing SAE as a second dialect, however,
students are likely to feel that their first dialect (their mother tongue and a
symbol of their cultural identity) is under threat. Aboriginal students need af-
firmadon of their existing linguistic identities as a preamble to learning SAE for
134 Language Awareness

the exploration and development of further multiple identities. Those who have
developed bi-dialectal competence feel empowered by the ways in which they
can project various identities depending on the context in which they speak.
Developing a mono-dialectal competence in SAE may disempower or alienate
Aboriginal people in socio-cvdtural contexts where interactions are predomi-
nantly conducted in Aboriginal English, or in Kriol, such as in their extended
family.
Learning SAE as a second dialect implies power relationships between stu-
dents' home talk and SAE, the latter being 'othered' by the former. It is alarming
that in many instances, the survey uses 'students who speak English' as opposed
to 'those who speak Aboriginal English'. This, perhaps unintentionally, raises
the status of SAE to a 'language' and Aboriginal English to a 'dialect'. This might
suggest that the former is a complete form, but not the latter. Already many peo-
ple think of Aboriginal English as 'lacking a grammar'. Studies of Aboriginal
English, however, have shown not only the systematicity of its grammar, but
also its rich cultural-conceptual basis, at least from a Western perspective (e.g.
Eades, 1982; Hearkins, 1994; Malcolm & Sharifian, 2002, 2005; Sharifian, 2002a,
2006; Sharifian et al., 2004; Zubrick et al, 2006, voltime 3, summary booklet, p. 16).
The privilege that one variety gains over others is not based on linguistic
considerations, but how it is socio-politically construed across various layers of
the society. It is not 'dropping a sound' or 'not using an auxiliary verb' which
makes a dialect regarded as inferior, it is how their speakers are viewed in the
society that determines whether or not the dialect is 'standard' or acceptable.
Siegel (2006: 41), writing for the American reader, makes the following remarks
in relation to this:
The standard dialect of British English, for example, also has features that
are unacceptable or incorrect in standard American English. It uses words
such as rubber instead of eraser, and it has expressions such as J haven't
a book. Just as those broken vernaculars leave out sounds in words and
words in sentences - like saying toi instead of told and He sick instead of
He is sick - British English has no r sounds in words like park and leaves
out words, as in My father is in Hospital (instead of in the hospital). But in
contrast to what many people say about vernaculars, they would not say
that British English is bad or incorrect English - just that they speak a
different kind of English.
It is to be noted that many employers of ESL teachers around the world
consider SAE as 'non-standard' and they only employ speakers of American or
British English. Some employers regard American English as the only 'standard'
English, no matter which dialect of American English one speaks.

Aboriginal Engiish, Academic Performance and Assessment

Also relevant here is the survey's observation that, 'Students who spoke Abo-
riginal English in the classroom were over twice as likely to be rated at low
academic performance than students who spoke English in the classroom' (Sum-
mary booklet, p. 16). This again may be interpreted as, either that Aboriginal
English hinders academic performance or that assessment tools do not recognise
Aboriginal English in ttie Classraom 135

literacy in Aboriginal English as relevant and valid. That is, the evaluative tools
currently used in schools, such as the West Australian Literacy and Numeracy
Assessment (WALNA)^ test, do not recognise literacy in Aboriginal English. In
fact, these tests do not even acknowledge inter-dialectal development. For ex-
ample, when learning SAE, students may initially learn the text structure of SAE,
but use Aboriginal English to express the content, and this is not acknowledged
as 'progress' by tests, such as WALNA. The following email from a teacher (to
the author) is testimony to this.

When I got back I was handed a whole series of stories that the Yr 3/4's
had been working on that are great examples of SAE story structure but
AE language. They were super stoked with their efforts as was I. If only
WALNA accepted AE!
According to the teacher, then, students have made progress towards learn-
ing SAE by learning its structure, an effort which is not acknowledged by tests,
such as WALNA. In this context, Nero (2006:13) maintains that 'ultimately, ap-
propriate placement and assessment for linguistically diverse students requires
familiarity with their actual language use, acceptance of students' self-ascribed
linguistic identities, and alternative assessments that go beyond standardized
testing'.
In addition, no research to date has shown a negative effect of the use of
vernacular in the classroom, in contexts where the vernacular is accepted and
used as a resource in the classroom. Siegel (2006:49) refers to the studies carried
out in this area so far and observes that

None of these evaluations or experimental studies show any negative

effects resulting from the use of the vernacular in the classroom, clearly
illustrating that the concern about interference is not justified. In fact,
these evaluations and studies show positive effects in increased ability in
standard English and general academic performance.
Moreover, literacy is not just about language, but about developing the con-
ceptual knowledge that the school promotes. Thus, some Aboriginal students
may have made some degree of progress in acquiring the school's conceptual
system, but they might be expressing it in Aboriginal English, which is not
recognised by the current assessment devices. Aboriginal students also bring
alternative literacies to the school, which are unlikely to be recognised as rel-
evant to the school. For example. Aboriginal students develop a conceptual
system based on their cultural experiences and knowledge that has been passed
on to them, which may be at odds with the school system. Aboriginal English
and Aboriginal languages are not simply a matter of grammar and sound, but
largely, clothing Aboriginal worldviews that embody Aboriginal taxonomies of
people, animals and the environment (e.g. Mark & Turk, 2003).

Aboriginal English and Culturally Sensitive Education

In the recommendations made for improving culturally inclusive schooling,
the survey includes the following suggestion:
136 Language Awareness

- setting the educational agenda for the development of a tolerant and

inclusive society that is knowledgeable about, and respectful of, cultural
difference.

However, language is an integral aspect of students' culture, since it is a

symbol of their cultural identity and also expresses their cultural conceptualisa-
tions. Thus, the development of a culturally sensitive schooling would require
acknowledging and respecting students' linguistic repertoire. An interesting
and relevant observation included in the survey is part of its preface written by
Jill Milroy and Helen Milroy:

Aboriginal children learnt and used 'Aboriginal English' in their families

and communities, but in schools it was treated as 'bad English' that needed
to be corrected. Aboriginal children were made to feel ashamed of how
they and their families spoke. They were forced to use Standard Australian
English and then marked poorly when they did so. In Western Australia,
Aboriginal people have fought a long battle to have Aboriginal English,
and the worldview that accompanies it, accepted and valued by the Edu-
cation Department. Aboriginal English speakers can now be recognised as
bi-dialectical [sic] with linguistic competencies in different but not inferior
forms of English.

This appears to have direct implications for the findings and recommen-
dations in the survey. The preface seems to support bi-dialecticism at school,
whereas the rest of the survey does not appear to suggest or promote this, at
least explicitly. In fact, many observations in the preface have significant impli-
cations for the report's findings, but remain unexplored. For example, contrasts
are drawn between 'Aboriginal knowledge systems' and 'western knowledge
and education system'. Consider the following:

Aboriginal knowledge systems are based on intimate relationships not fo-

cused on what things are as much as who they are and how they are related.
Everything has spirit, feeling and law. This applies equally to all things
- rocks, wind, land, plants, animals or people. Trees, arümals, rocks are
related to us as brothers, sisters, aunties. In contrast, western knowledge
systems appear to have limited definitions of what is 'living', classify a
broad set of objects as inanimate and place living 'things' in a hierarchy
of complexity and therefore, 'value'. For Aboriginal people, spiritual and
physical worlds are continuous and interactive, our ancestors still speak
to us in daily life. In western knowledge and education systems spiritual
and physical worlds are separate, consigned to their respective secular
and religious (or occasionally perhaps paranormal) realms. (Zubrick et al.,
2006: xxii)

In fact, the contrast in the above quote is very much embodied in Aboriginal
languages and Aboriginal English. Thus, developing bi-dialectal competence
may open two sets of windows on the world for speakers.
Aboriginal Englist) in the Classroom 137

The Emotional Aspect of Second-Dialect Learning

One important and largely neglected issue in research on second lan-
guage/dialect acquisition is the emotional aspect. Classical paradigms in sec-
ond language acquisition have largely viewed language learning from a cog-
nitive perspective, although more recent approaches focus on its emotional
as well as socio-cultural foundation. Recent research on emotional experience
in second language acquisition (e.g. Dewaele & Pavlenko, 2002; Pavlenko &
Dewaele, 2004) suggests that 'the LI is preferred to express emotional involve-
ment whereas the L2 is experienced as colder, more distant, and more detached
from the L2 user and less appropriate for the expression of emotions' (Dewaele,
2005: 374). Second-dialect learners are likely to experience similar degrees of
distance between their first and second dialect in terms of the expression of
emotions. Thus, teachers would need to work with learners to develop com-
petence and confidence in using their second dialect to express emotions, if
learning SAE is to become part of the person as a whole, rather than simply a
tool for societal mobility.

Who Speaks Aboriginal English?

Another important question is how teachers would make svire that their stu-
dents do not speak Aboriginal English in the classroom, by identifying a change
in the grammar and sounds of their speech. In fact, Sharifian (2002b, 2005) has
provided sigrüficant evidence that in metropolitan schools, where some Aborig-
inal students do not sound as if they speak Aboriginal English, the conceptual
basis of their speech is largely the one associated with Aboriginal English. Thus,
identification of whether students are speaking Aboriginal English requires cau-
tion, especially if there are implications for educational policies.
Finally, though, the survey should nevertheless receive credit for its recogni-
tion of Aboriginal English, since many educators do not even acknowledge its
existence. This author has encountered a number of educators who dismiss the
notion of Aboriginal English as a dialect of English and who simply describe
differences that they observe in the speech of Aboriginal students as 'laziness' in
talk, 'bad grammar', 'lack of grammar', etc. (see Malcolm et al, 1999). Some even
become concerned to the point where they refer Aboriginal English speakers to
speech pathologists and school psychologists. All in the name of 'education'!

Correspondence
Any correspondence should be directed to Dr. Farzad Sharafian, Monash
University, School of Languages, Cultures, and Linguistics, Faculty of Arts,
Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia (farzad.sharifian@arts.monash.edu.au).

Note
1. http://www,eddept.wa.edu,au/walna/

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