Recognising the SAE language learning needs of Indigenous primary school students who speak contact languages

Most Indigenous peoples live in urban and regional locations across Australia and no longer speak their traditional languages fluently. Instead contact languages, creoles and dialects, are widely spoken. In many educational settings, educators may know little about the first languages of the Indigenous children they teach, and not recognise these as different languages or dialects. Consequently, these students may not be treated as second language learners of Standard Australian English (SAE) and their language learning requirements are not considered. From a sociocultural perspective, language is crucial to students’ learning. In this paper, we quantitatively analyse the SAE learning needs of Indigenous primary school aged children in Far North Queensland using oral elicited imitation of simple sentences in SAE as a research method. Using one-way ANOVA, the results are compared with native monolingual SAE speakers showing significant differences between the two. This finding has important implications for classroom teaching practices and educational policies.