Speak Out August 2018

Branch News

Northern Territory

Teaching standard Australian speech sounds to students in the Northern Territory

Last year, the Northern Territory Department of Education (NT DoE) initiated an exciting new collaboration with Darwin’s community of speech pathologists to create a resource for teachers called Teaching Standard Australian Speech Sounds to Students in the Northern Territory . The resulting manual was authored by speech pathologists Erin Coonan and Melissa Ridd from the Children’s Development Team; Amy Southwood from Carpentaria Kids; Bea Staley, Rebecca Amery and Suzanne Howitt at Charles Darwin University, as well as graduate student Kelly Rampmeyer. It is now freely available to share and use under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives licence (in simple terms this means, you can share it, and use it freely as long as you cite appropriately and don’t make money from it) at https://cdu.edu.au/education/staff- profiles/b-staley There are 153 government schools in the NT enrolling 33,000 students. Of these schools, 73% are located in remote and very remote areas with 46% of NT students enrolled at these schools. Designed to give teachers in remote and very remote schools ideas for working with Standard Australian English (SAE) speech sounds in their classrooms, it is anticipated that the manual will be officially launched later this year by the NT Minister for Education. This resource was designed specifically with NT’s Aboriginal students in mind. More than 100 Aboriginal languages and dialects are spoken in the NT, and Aboriginal children are often raised in multilingual communities exposed to speech sounds from various Aboriginal languages, dialects, and creoles. In some rural and remote areas of the Northern Territory, children may have had lots of experience with Aboriginal languages, but little exposure to SAE before their arrival at school. Sixty-five percent of Aboriginal children do not speak Standard Australian English at home, and SAE is spoken in only 54% of remote and 12% of very remote area households. This limited exposure to

SAE means some of our learners struggle to differentiate voiced/voiceless consonant pairs, and/or produce some of the SAE consonant sounds (e.g. fricatives like f, v). The manual contains a variety of activities and prompts for explicitly teaching SAE consonant and vowel sounds, and was designed with the assumption that there are frequent opportunities throughout the day where teachers can use speech sound instruction as a part of their broader contextualised language and literacy teaching. The activities are intended for use with the whole class, and the consonant section focuses on sounds at the word level in the initial consonant position only. With locally distinct illustrations by NT graphic designer Sarah Martin, this guide has pages of reproducible images which can be used as sound prompts. For each SAE consonant speech sound you will find words and pictures which can be used with the suggested activities. For each SAE vowel sound we have created a bunyip character to provide a visual representation for the vowel listening activities in the manual. This resource is in no way intended as a diagnostic tool, simply a teaching manual with a focus on listening to and producing SAE speech sounds. The manual will be trialled in five NT schools starting in Term 3. Teacher feedback will be incorporated into any edited versions of the manual or supporting materials. After the trial the manual will be disseminated to all NT schools. At this time, we are also developing short videos for teachers to use (these too will be uploaded and freely available later in the school term). Please feel free to download and use the resource and we welcome any feedback you have about the manual and your experience using the manual in Australian classrooms. Please email me at bea.staley@cdu.edu.au

NT 55 members as at July 2018

Bea Staley Speech Pathologist

Image credits: Sarah Martin

35

August 2018 www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au

Speak Out