Assessing Australian and New Zealand Indigenous Languages

Abstract

The assessment of children's indigenous language has, in general, received very little attention despite the fact that it is a worldwide issue with children in every continent growing up in multilingual situations. In this chapter we focus on approaches to assessing children's indigenous language knowledge in two very different contexts—Australia and New Zealand. Indigenous languages in Australia are in rapid decline. At the time of European settlement there were in the region of 250 languages, many of which were spoken by only a small number of people. However, there are now few indigenous communities where children are growing up learning their traditional indigenous language, and it is predicted that at the current rate of loss there will be no indigenous languages by 2050. The situation in New Zealand is quite different, with Māori being the single indigenous language. However, it is spoken by less than 25% of the Māori population (approximately 15% of New Zealand's population of 4 million are Māori) and is also in decline. In these different contexts, therefore, approaches to assessment are necessarily different. In Australia the limited amount of research that has been undertaken has focused on receptive skills, arguing that these measures can provide a useful picture of children's current language knowledge. In New Zealand, all Māori children are exposed to both English and Māori while growing up, but given the prevalence of English in New Zealand society it is difficult to determine how many Māori children truly are first language speakers of Māori or Māori dominant. Almost all Māori‐speaking children attend kōhanga reo (early childhood education centers based on Māori culture and using Māori as the medium of communication) and some form of Māori bilingual/immersion education in the compulsory school sector. Assessment tools developed for the Māori‐medium sector have focused on numeracy and literacy, although recent research has attempted to develop measures to assess students' proficiency of spoken Māori.

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