Outreach

The Patji-Dawes Language Teaching Award honours outstanding achievements in teaching languages other than English by an accomplished practitioner or team of practitioners in Australia.

“We established the Patji-Dawes Award because we wanted to honour the unsung heroes of language teaching in Australia,” CoEDL Director Nick Evans reflected. “Our society needs to realise the power of other languages to open your heart and mind to other ways of being, and of hearing and seeing the world. Brilliant, magnetic teachers are at the front line of this effort, and this award is about them.”

The name of the award commemorates the earliest documented language education partnership in Australia’s history: that between a young Indigenous woman Patyegarang (Patye or Patji, pronounced Pat-chee) and a British naval officer, Lieutenant William Dawes.

Biennially since 2015, CoEDL has conferred the award as part of its commitment to elevating public awareness of languages and celebrating multilingualism in Australia. In the inaugural year, the award went to Sarah Payne, a teacher of French and German at Canberra Grammar School.

Linguist and teacher Dr John Giacon received the award in 2017. John introduced teaching of Australian Indigenous language Gamilaraay at the Australian National University and the University of Sydney.

The 2019 Patji-Dawes award coincided with the International Year of Indigenous Languages. To mark this special occasion, the awarding committee chose to confer two awards. Sophia Mung, a Gija woman from Purnululu (East Kimberley, WA), received an award in recognition of decades of tireless work to ensure the Gija language is passed down to future generations. The second award went to Brother Stephen Morelli, a teacher and linguist who has collaborated with Indigenous communities on the New South Wales mid-north coast for over 30 years, working to revive and teach the Gumbaynggirr language.

In 2021, CoEDL marked its final year hosting the initiative. Three recipients were acknowledged: Maria Lo Presti, an Italian teacher, received an award in the Individual category; the staff of the Charles Sturt University Graduate Certificate of Wiradjuri Language, Culture and Heritage received an award in the Group category; and Sharon Gregory, a Noongar woman and teacher, received an award for Community Outreach.

From 2021, administration of the award, will pass to the Australian Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations (AFMLTA) and the Languages and Cultures Network for Australian Universities (LCNAU), co-sponsors of the initiative since its inception, showing the value that is placed on its continuance

Members of CoEDL and the Indigenous Alliance for Linguistic Research (IALR) formed the ‘Decolonising Linguistics: Spinning a Better Yarn’ study group in 2021 with support from the Centre and the Research Unit for Indigenous Language (RUIL).

IALR commenced in May 2019, initially through CoEDL support and continuing in partnership with the Australian Linguistic Society. The Alliance aims to function as a professional group for supporting Indigenous people working in linguistics and to promote ethical best practice in research.

The Decolonising Linguistics series pursues these goals by fostering discussion around decolonising research methodologies and how to position Indigenous knowledge, experience and agency at the centre of linguistics research. Organisers, including CoEDL members Jakelin Troy, Lesley Woods, Ruth Singer, Felicity Meakins and more, host regular discussions focused on reading research from Indigenous academics; rethinking how to teach and conduct research on linguistics in culturally sensitive ways; and acknowledging Indigenous knowledge-holders and collaborators in academic outputs. Sessions are open to the public and recordings are available online.

Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants are encouraged, yet the format and facilitators of the sessions prioritise Indigenous voices, in recognition of the history of marginalisation. Each session is opened by an Indigenous person and many discussions are led by Indigenous hosts. Many emphasised a common goal of making linguistics accessible to the community, fostering knowledge that is authentic to, and recognises the diverse experiences and preferences of, Indigenous people.

“In essence, what we’re really wanting to talk about is how to bring what I think is a developing new-practice model in linguistics — not only in Australia, but worldwide — that linguistics is not only about what is owned by the academies,” AI Jaky Troy explained in the group’s first session. “It is also something that is — perhaps even more so in the case of Indigenous languages — owned by community.”

In 2016, a team of researchers at CoEDL’s Western Sydney University node — including CI Caroline Jones and CoEDL members Rachel Hendery, Gloria Pino Escobar and Valeria Peretokina — developed a language-themed escape room by adapting exercises from the Australian Computational Linguistics Olympiad (OzCLO). Rosita Stone introduces school-aged children to linguistics and computational thinking through puzzles that encourage logical skills, creative problem solving and teamwork.

In the exercise, Rosita Stone is a professor of linguistics. Students visit her office and uncover a series of language puzzles, which are designed to be decoded without prior knowledge of linguistics. The challenges include decrypting Egyptian hieroglyphics, interpreting Etruscan dice numbers, and comparing emails written between Professor Stone and her Danish collaborator to translate Danish words that lead to the next clue.

The team ran Rosita Stone exercises several times, including for the Egyptian Mummies exhibition at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney and for WSU’s Pathways to Dreaming program, which connects Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander high school students with university study options.

“No one had even heard of linguistics before the event,” reflected Rachel Hendery after the Pathways to Dreaming workshop. “They certainly all had by the end of it and realised that it might be something they could have fun doing.”

Rachel said it was also a great way of getting some students interested in computational thinking even if they were not drawn to maths or science. “In one group of eight students who put their hands up when I asked who had had fun solving the puzzles, only one kept their hand up when I asked who also enjoyed maths. Yet all of them had enjoyed solving practical puzzles that actually involved logical and computational thinking of the kind that maths and linguistics both involve.”

The WSU CoEDL team conducted training workshops during the 2018 Summer School to show teachers how to use linguistics puzzles to encourage logic and problem-solving skills in the classroom, with the hope of bringing Rosita Stone to more school groups.

There are currently few assessment tools for speech and language which are designed for Australian children, especially for health and education professionals working with Indigenous children and their families. Inappropriate assessment tools lead to over-identification of spoken language impairments and inefficiencies in service provision for children who do need support.

Recognising the need for fairer assessment tools for Indigenous children, CI Caroline Jones worked with a team including Jaidine Fejo, Eugenie Collyer and Chantelle Khamchuang to develop the Early Language Inventory (ERLI). ERLI is a checklist of children's first words and gestures (hand-signs). It is an authorised short-form adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. Over 2014 – 2019, Caroline and her team co-designed the checklist by working closely with local families in the Katherine region of the Northern Territory.

ERLI includes 120 items (112 words and 8 hand-signs) that are familiar to Indigenous families in the Katherine region. It asks the parent how they say each item at home, meaning the child gets credit for an item no matter the language they know it in. Research shows that Iocal Indigenous children around Katherine perform well on ERLI and produce nearly all items by age three.

“In under 15 minutes, ERLI can help parents, educators or speech pathologists screen for whether a child under 3 may have a speech, language or hearing problem, because it assesses the child in the language(s) or dialect(s) they speak at home, based on expert knowledge from the parent about their child,” Caroline explains.

During her Honours research, CoEDL PhD student and Dharug woman Chantelle Khamchuang found that ERLI was also suitable for Aboriginal families in western Sydney. Children scored higher on ERLI than on the regular Australian English checklist (OZI-SF) and Aboriginal parents in Sydney preferred ERLI. "There are Aboriginal people from all over Australia living in western Sydney, and although of course different groups have different languages and cultures, we do each mostly have a word or hand-sign for the items on ERLI," Chantelle explains.

ERLI is now having impact beyond research, including in speech pathology — for both curriculum, and practice in community health and private settings — and in maternal nurse home visiting. There is also increasing interest from early educators and health services keen for a fairer way to measure Indigenous children's progress in learning to communicate.

ERLI and supporting resources are available for free use here .

Language use impacts an individual’s wellbeing and ability to access services. Knowing who speaks what languages where is essential if governments are to make and implement policies that improve outcomes in these areas, yet this type of data is not easy to find.

Several CoEDL members applied their research to improving language policy in Australia. This included investigating language ecologies — the ways of using language for different purposes and to different extents — among First Nations people of different generations. Researchers considered these ecologies alongside Australian Census data to make recommendations to government bodies.

This work led to at least 10 doctoral theses, the Well-being and Indigenous Language Ecologies (WILE) framework [10] and the first quantitative evidence in Australia connecting language use and wellbeing [11]. It also provided the foundation for the National Indigenous Languages Report (NILR) [12], prepared with CoEDL partner institution AIATSIS.

CoEDL members applied this approach internationally in two reports for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). A team led by CoEDL Research Affiliate Inge Kral surveyed Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and Canada for promising practices in early childhood education [13] and another team including CoEDl members Denise Angelo, Samantha Disbray, Ruth Singer, Carmel O’Shannessy, Deputy Director Jane Simpson and CI Jill Wigglesworth did the same for Indigenous languages at school [14].