Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 10, Issue 2, 1987

The paper examines developmental aspects relating to how Warlpiri children introduce referents and maintain reference in narrative. Comparisons are made with the three levels of development proposed by Karmiloff-Smith, based on her work on cohesion in narrative with French- and English-speaking children. Examples are presented from children’s narratives to illustrate that Warlpiri children under six generally use ellipsis of core arguments without introducing the participants, while older children use ellipsis anaphorically, that is only after introducing the participants. The strategies for marking inter-sentence relations develop over a few years. Once the child is able to organize a narrative around a theme, there can be more flexibility in structuring the narrative.

This paper looks at the history of language policy formulation and implementation in conjunction with social factors influencing attitudes to both Koorie1 people and their languages.

It endeavours to trace the process of enforced language shift, with consequent language death, in the social history of Australia.

Factors which aid or are hastening language death in the contemporary period are also discussed.

Attention is drawn to the rapidity with which language death has occurred and will continue to occur if measures are not taken to curb the current trends.

This article is an introduction to and a brief overview of the National Policy on Languages. It traces the development of the Policy, concentrating on some major contributing factors. It then describes the content of the Policy and assesses its present status and future prospects.

The study of language attitudes and language maintenance and shift in intergroup settings has not always been related to an explicit model of the intergroup situation itself. Such a model is available in Tajfel’s Social Identity Theory. This paper explores the potential of the model for predicting and explaining language maintenance and shift among immigrant and indigenous groups in Australia. The theory forms the basis of a study of the maintenance of modern Hebrew among immigrants from Israel in Melbourne, and is used to reinterpret the findings of several other recent Australian studies.

VARBRUL analysis is a well known technique used in sociolinguistics for the analysis of variable linguistic phenomena and it is suggested that it would also be useful as a tool in Applied Linguistics. A VARBRUL analysis was undertaken of the placement of students of non-English speaking background (NESB) in high, average and low English and mathematics streams in N.S.W. high schools. The purpose of the study was to determine whether or not NESB students were over-represented in the low stream. The factor groups analyzed were ethnic background, school subject and country of birth.

This paper examines the place of language descriptions in the evaluation of bilingual education. Based on a partial analysis of data derived from the third year of a study of a Macedonian/English bilingual education program in a primary school in Melbourne, the paper suggests that the variation between children both in the forms of language which they use and in the way In which they express the knowledge available to them will have to be one of the major features of the analysis. The paper examines the varying relations between conceptual awareness and the forms of expression used by some of the children. The paper argues for a framework of the description of language development which takes account of the variation within and between individuals.

In this article it is claimed that there is a set of universal speech processing constraints which applies to all types of second language acquisition. These constraints define the range of possible hypotheses about the structure of the L2 which a learner can create at a given stage of development and cannot be overridden by formal instruction or by other alterations in the linguistic input.

These claims, however, do not imply that all types of language acquisition are identical or that teaching has no influence whatsoever on the way a second language develops in a formal context. It has been shown elsewhere (cf. Pienemann, 1984, 1985, 1987a) that under certain conditions teaching can influence formal L2 development. These demonstrable positive effects of teaching, however, remain inside the variational margin left open by the processing constraints.

The present paper reports on the interlanguage development of one learner of German as a second language, selected from a broader longitudinal study of one year’s duration. It was found that the learner’s word order development was identical to the natural development of German as a second language despite the progression intended in the teaching. A similar result was obtained in the development of verbal morphology. It is also shown that agreement marking is acquired at the same time as specific word order rules.

This article describes the methodology underlying the National Curriculum Project. This project, established in response to recommendations of the Committee of Review of the Adult Migrant Education Program (AMEP), is expected to generate curriculum guidelines and teacher support resources for AMEP teachers in Australia by mid-1988. The participation of all levels of the AMEP workforce – professional, administrative and support – is advocated for a project involving research and resources provision for teachers who are responsible for all aspects of the learner-centred, needs-based curriculum process of the AMEP.

This paper explores the differences and common ground in the process writing approach and the procedural or process approaches to language teaching put forward by various British applied linguists. Although some important differences exist between the two “process approaches”, particularly in the role of research data as a basis for proposing teaching methods, they have a common view of teaching and learning. This paper argues that, despite giving some useful insights, these approaches devalue, in varying degrees, teaching, meaning and group relations. It is concluded that Australian educators would do well to be less dependent on proposals emanating from overseas and to take their own and others’ theorizing and practices more seriously.

A significant educational development that has occurred in Australia in recent years has been the emergence of the genre-based approach to the teaching of writing. The theoretical basis of this approach lies in the systemic, functional model of language developd by M.A.K. Halliday and others. Thus it is an approach to writing which focuses on the relationship between written texts and the contexts in which written texts are produced.

This paper traces the development of the genrebased approach. It discusses the meaning of the term “genre”, and describes the contribution of people such as Kress, Martin, Rothery and Christie to the theoretical development of the approach. It also describes some of the educational programs that have been developed to implement the genrebased approach.

It is argued in this paper that the most significant contribution of the genre-based approach to writing is the development of an explicit understanding of the role of language in the educational context and a linguistic description of the major genres that children are expected to learn as they learn to write. It is in this area, that is, making the role of language explicit, that the genre-based approach differs most from other approaches such as the “growth model” of English teaching and “process writing” which have been influential in recent years.

This paper aims to demonstrate how Halliday’s Functional Grammar (1985) may be used to illuminate educational questions, more specifically to illuminate the study of classroom discourse. Portion of a text from the lower primary school is examined. It is in fact drawn from a Morning News learning activity. It is argued that we can identify a “curriculum genre” in such a text, and that this has certain characteristic elements, giving it a particular schematic structure. These elements are identified, and two aspects of the functional grammar – namely, Theme and transitivity – are used with a view to proving the presence of the schematic structure. Through the examination, it is argued that the meanings children are constrained to make in the Morning News situation are of a limited kind, revealing a great deal about the limitations of much early childhood education.

This paper proposes a three-tiered approach to genre analysis. A system of generic stages is derived from configurations of options from the systems of transitivity, mood, theme, conjunction, reference and tense. Generic structures, motivated by context-specific generic strategies, are, in turn, derived from generic stages. The approach is applied to a small corpus of press articles dealing with the relation between parents and children.

In this article research on the relationship between language and gender in Australian society Is surveyed. Three main areas are discussed: gender differencies in the use of Australian English; the issue of sexism in Australian language use; and the role of gender in the maintenance of languages other than English (Aboriginal and immigrant languages). The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the recent developments in and further tasks for Australian language gender research.