ACQ Vol 13 no 3 2011

funded school for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in an urban area of North Queensland. This school did not have routine access to assessment or support services such as psychologists or advisory special education teachers, but a limited speech pathology service was provided by a university student clinic for children in prep and years 1 and 2. Teachers were asked to identify children who were “making normal or good progress in school”. There is no “gold standard” assessment of academic or oral language skills recommended for Aboriginal children (de Plevitz, 2006; Gould, 2008) so teacher evaluations of academic progress were considered the best available referent for this pilot study. Standard Australian English (SAE) was the primary language of instruction used by teachers at the school. Development of the ability to effectively code switch between SAE and Aboriginal English (AE) was encouraged in the classroom context. Most families of children attending the school were reported to be from low socioeconomic backgrounds, with high levels of unemployment. The children were brought to and from the school on a bus owned by the school, a measure designed to facilitate school attendance. Demographic data for the six participants are summarised in the first part of table 1. Teachers reported that SAE was spoken in the home of one participant, whereas AE was spoken in the homes of the remaining participants. Due to limited resourcing for this pilot study, access to parents or other responsible family members was not possible to gain further background information. The hearing and health status of the children was unknown. Procedure All language samples were collected by the second author, a non-Aboriginal, who addressed the children using SAE, as would be typical for most speech pathology assessments in Australia. This context was considered likely to elicit SAE from the participants if they were capable of doing so. Participants were seen at school, firstly engaging in group conversation and games to ensure that the children felt comfortable with the examiner. Each participant then individually engaged in conversation with the examiner followed by elicitation of a retell of the wordless picture book Frog, Where Are You? (FWAY) (Mayer, 1969). The examiner told the story following a set script (Miller & Iglesias, 2008), after which each participant retold the story using the book as a visual aid. Examiner prompts were restricted to provision of support to begin the story and open-ended cues to continue the retell. For example “Keep going” or “You are doing a great job!” This retell approach reflected display language which is not always culturally appropriate in some Aboriginal communities; the extent to which this applies to Aboriginal people living in urban contexts is unknown. However, the approach was selected because it followed the procedure used to collect the language samples for the comparison data base, is commonly used in speech pathology practice, and the children in the present study were accustomed to displaying their knowledge in the classroom. The participants’ narratives were audio recorded and transcribed by the first author into the computer software program Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) (Miller & Iglesias, 2008). Utterances were segmented into communication units (C-units) defined as “an independent clause and its modifiers” (Loban, 1976, as

accuracy (GA). These measures are sensitive to both development (Heilmann et al., 2010) and LI in school-age children (Fey et al., 2004). Macrostructure analyses are used to investigate the ability to construct and sequence a representation of the main story elements including the setting, problem, attempts at solving the problem, and a resolution (Heilmann et al., 2010). Narrative complexity increases with age (Heilmann et al., 2010). Compared with their typically developing peers, children with LI produce structurally poorer narratives (Epstein & Phillips, 2009; Fey et al., 2004). Much of the current literature on Aboriginal children’s language skills includes broad descriptors of Aboriginal oral discourse, pragmatic, lexical, and grammatical features. The features of many varied dialects are drawn from a range of specific geographical localities and language communities and collectively termed “Aboriginal English” (AE), with comparisons drawn against Standard Australian English (SAE) (Berry & Hudson, 1997; Butcher, 2008; Malcolm et al., 1999; Speech Pathology Australia, 2007; Turnbull, 2002). From this literature, we know that events in Aboriginal narratives often focus on movement from place to place and connection to prior experiences of the speaker or listener. Their narratives are less focused on linear timelines than those of non-Aboriginal Australians. Orientation with respect to people and place is also important. Morphosyntactic features include omission of plurals, tense markers and prepositions or variations in the forms used (e.g., “them two boy gonna catchim fish”). Pronoun forms may be varied with respect to case, possession, and lack of gender marking (e.g., “e” for “he” and “she”). Pragmatic differences include the acceptance of silence and choosing not to respond. Lexical items may also differ (e.g., “gammin” to mean “nonsense” or “just kidding”). These features are not described in the literature with reference to developmental norms, or with respect to assessment frameworks for oral narrative that are typically used in speech pathology practice. Consequently, clinicians may be unsure about how to interpret the presence or absence of features of AE. Considering the importance of oral narrative performance to diagnosis and academic outcomes, there is a clear need for ongoing research to investigate the characteristics of oral narrative produced by Aboriginal children across many regions of Australia. To this end, this pilot research project aimed to answer the following questions: 1. What are the microstructure and macrostructure characteristics of oral narratives produced by Aboriginal children in North Queensland? 2. How do the oral narratives of Aboriginal children compare to norms derived from existing LSA databases? Methodology Ethics approval for this research was granted by the James Cook University Human Research Ethics Committee and the school that the participants attended. Families received information about the aims, objectives, and benefits of being part of the study from an Aboriginal teacher aide. Families interested in being involved in the study provided informed written consent. Participants Six Aboriginal children aged between 6;6 and 9;6 years were recruited from a church-managed, government-

127

ACQ Volume 13, Number 3 2011

www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au