Remote Indigenous education and translanguaging

Abstract

Indigenous1 children living in the more remote areas of Australia where Indigenous languages continue to be spoken often come to school with only minimal knowledge of English, but they may speak two or more local languages. Others come to school speaking either a creole, or Aboriginal English, non-standard varieties which may sound similar to English, which gives them their vocabulary, while differing in terms of structure, phonology and semantics and pragmatics. This paper begins with a discussion of the linguistic contexts the children come from and the school contexts the children enter into before moving on to discuss a potential role for some use of translanguaging techniques in the classroom and discussing the potential benefits and advantages these may have. 1The term Indigenous is used respectfully to refer to all people of Australian Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent. Indigenous languages and Australian Indigenous languages are used to refer to the languages of both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders following NILS3 (2020).