Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 11, Issue 1, 1988

The extensive massacre of Aboriginal people in the Roper River region of the Northern Territory resulted in drastic language disruption. The settling of remnants of many language groups at the Roper River mission led to the creation of Kriol. Now, after five generations, it is the primary language of many thousands of people.

Bible translation and bilingual education programs have been highly significant in raising the status of Kriol. Its future seems assured, particularly as it increasingly becomes associated with Aboriginal identity and political aspirations.

The spoken Italian of migrant Italians in New Zealand contains verbal devices which accompany items transferred from English. These “transference markers” (paralinguistic and prosodic features, hesitation phenomena, hedges, synonymous glosses and explicative statements) convey the speaker’s awareness that the marked items are in fact transfers, and invite a response, verbal or otherwise, from the hearer. This exchange of signals is one way in which conversational interactants negotiate a consensus as to what is comprehensible and acceptable linguistic behaviour to both. Migrant bilinguals can thus be shown to be not only creative language users but also more able than is usually thought, to monitor and control the transference process in their speech.

The functional variants of International English are often differently distributed in the different regional standards. With evidence from the corpus of Australian English, this has already been shown for lexical variants such as will/shall, maybe/perhaps etc. In this paper evidence from the Australian corpus is used to discuss a number of variables in

a) morphology

b) the system of conjunction

c) the system of quantifiers.

The redistribution of morphological variants-edl-t (as in burned/burnt), and -wards(s) (as in downward(s)) showed a tendency to assign different grammatical roles to each variant. Among the conjunctions, apart from individual differences the most interesting finding was the higher level overall in the use of subordinating conjunctions, when Australian newspaper data was compared with the equivalent in Britain or America. A possible explanation for this invokes the Hallidayan principle that subordination is actually more common in speech than in writing. The suggestion is that Australian press reporting approximates more closely to spoken than to written norms of language. But on the quantifiers a few/several the corpus provides no support for a new popular use of several, to mean vaguely large number.

This paper describes the development of interpreting and translating within the Health Services of New South Wales. Examples are provided of purposes and contexts in which translation and interpreting are used. Some of the difficulties involved in interpreting and translating in this context are described. Criteria for selecting material for various kinds of interpretation or translation are provided.

Implicit in every metaphor is a comparison involving 5 parts: like a is to b, so x is to y. When translating into languages in which metaphors are seldom or never used, some or all of these parts must be made explicit to make the metaphor understood. Metaphors may be categorized as 1) incidental, 2) repeated, 3) extended, 4) thematic and 5) symbolic; the importance of retaining them being progressively greater from 1) to 5). We may 1) leave the metaphor literal, 2) render it a simile, 3) make explicit one or more of the parts, 4) use a cultural substitute or 5) drop the metaphor and translate the meaning. Making all 5 parts explicit may skew the focus or result in unnatural style.

This paper examines the development of comparisons and contrasts in young L1 children and in L2 adults. It explores the similarities and differences in categories, lexicogrammatical realizations and functions. It was found that similarities existed in extent and effect, in categories and some realizations, and in some minor functions Against these similarities, differences were found in order of development of the categories, in importance of categories, in one category, in realizations and in major functions. The paper concludes with an investigation of implications for (i) teaching; and (ii) the L1-L2 “similarity/difference?” debate.

Using fundamental frequency measurements taken from mingograph traces, the direction and range of pitch movements were studied in a series of utterances produced by native speakers of French and by a group of (near-) beginner students of that language. Results were also compared to the Delattre models for major and minor continuation and finality.

Analysis of the native speakers allows us to determine the extent to which the pattern of pitch movement is a function of the speaking context. It is then possible to see additional differences occurring when the task is performed by foreign language learners.

Our most significant findings relate to differences between the utterances of free conversation and those occurring in controlled contexts (oral reading, repetition, drill responses), and to a certain blurring of the distinction between major and minor continuation in student speech.

The paper presents an analysis of the initial stages of foreign language phoneme acquisition and a report from two years of empirical research designed to verify the validity of some of its findings. The most interesting results seem to have been obtained so far in the study of those linguistic and non-linguistic factors which are related to the learner’s age: they indicate that interference from native phonemes the learners have stored in their memory may not necessarily be the only, or the most important, factor responsible for older learners’ problems with learning foreign phonemes during the initial stages.

In the current climate of English as a Second Language (ESL) teaching in Australia, there is an increasing stress on the greater direct participation of teachers in curriculum and materials development, including assessment and evaluation. The paper considers Stenhouse’s notion of Teacher as Researcher and its application in the ESL context. It raises questions for the ongoing re-examination of the role of the ESL teacher.

The ambiguity in the title is meaningful in the following way: ‘Communicative Grammar’ describes the relationship between the rules of grammar and the pragmatic principles of communication. ‘Communicative Development’ of awareness of this relationship is a procedure which involves learners in solving problems of communicative grammar, as an individual, group and class activity. Learners for whom this procedure is most appropriate include advanced students of language, language teachers and language teacher educators, rather than language learners, whose need is to acquire language competence rather than awareness. The paper describes, exemplifies and justifies the process and the product.

The Australian Language Levels (ALL) Project is a national project funded jointly by the Curriculum Development Council, Canberra and the S.A. Education Department. It has been set up to develop an organizational framework and curriculum guidelines which will permit all those involved in language education (teachers, syllabus planners, advisers, curriculum writers) to work together to bring about curriculum renewal in language teaching in Australia.

This paper examines the curriculum implications of the complexity of the language situation in Australia and the processes through which the ALL Project is responding to curriculum needs in the languages field on a national scale.

Many different patterns of curriculum design have been proposed in recent years. Few of them have gone beyond the drawing board and been implemented in language programs. The Canadian Association of Second Language Teachers, which has recognized as a particular current Canadian problem, the teaching of French in non-immersion settings throughout Canada (so-called ‘Core French’), has launched a three-year project to improve the teaching of Core French through curriculum renewal. The project has adopted one such syllabus design model, that of a multidimensional second language curriculum. The project operates through six task forces and several regional committees. The paper/symposium is concerned with aspects of the rationale of the project, the design and rationale of the curriculum, the

The purpose of this paper is to assess the effect of student contributions to the development of a computer-aided language learning program for French. As part of a scheduled fortnightly summary review session, students are directly involved in an evaluation of the effectiveness of the grammar presentations and error response handling in the lessons. Detailed student feedback on the operation of the French CALL programs is analyzed relative to its effect upon such factors as the perceived usefulness of the program, degree of voluntary student usage and learner strategies in lesson taking.

An editing-test tests general language competence. The testee has to delete randomly inserted new words from an otherwise complete and perfect text. The project reported on is an evaluation of a series of lessons in Dutch as a second language of which explicit grammatical feedback is the main feature. The lessons consist of texts adapted as editing-tests, entirely administered and controlled by microcomputer. The feedback provided mainly refers to rules formulated in the pupils’ grammar, which is stored in the microcomputer. The paper provides information on the feedback – its contents and its instructional design – and, in particular, on the main results obtained.

This paper discusses oral translation work carried out in Australia. It argues that the physical presence of the translator is a significant factor both for the act of translation and for the development of typologies of translation. In his highly readable and extremely thought-provoking book Grammatical Man Jeremy Campbell titles one of his chapters “The Struggle against Randomness” (Campbell, 1982:75). I believe that this is an apt definition of our particular concerns with the development of text typologies. I consider it a struggle because in my view we are still grappling with the randomness of phenomena; we are still in a high entropy state. The aim of this paper is to attempt to make a small contribution to the typology debate by outlining some observations of certain data which form part of the random world of texts; these data are different in at least two ways: one, they are derived from the Australian context and two, they refer to “oral translations” which, while being specific to the Australian context are firmly ensconced in the universe of oral translations. I intend to briefly describe the Australian context and then outline the characteristics of that context which sets it apart from others. I shall then discuss a theoretical framework for the observations which will be subsequently described and finally, I shall venture a possible avenue for further investigation.