Working with children who speak Indigenous languages/dialects
- Working with children who speak Indigenous languages/dialects
- Partnering with family and community
- Working with children’s first language(s)
- Understanding the local context
- The impact of Australia’s history on Indigenous languages
- Resources
- Building on Indigenous children’s strengths
- Which Indigenous languages are spoken where?
- Mapping Indigenous languages
- Traditional languages
- New contact languages
- Englishes
- What is a dialect?
- How children learn Standard Australian English as an additional language or dialect
- A day in the life of …
- The difference between language and literacy learning
- The role of language in learning
- Bilingual schools
- Setting up for success
Like all families, Indigenous families want their children to have fun and flourish in early childhood educational settings.
For early childhood educators, this involves us working with local staff, community members, the children and their families to get to know each child they work with.
For non-local or non-Indigenous educators, this places an extra responsibility on them to learn about children’s rich knowledge of language(s), cultures, relationships and everyday life in their communities. Through this, educators are able to build on the knowledge they bring to preschool from home. Working with the children will also build an appreciation of the fact that many children are knowledgeable about more than one culture – grandparents and parents may be from different cultural backgrounds and the child has the richness of all that their relationships with family bring to them.
Many early childhood educators will have had little or no guidance on how young children are learning SAE alongside and in addition to their home language(s).
Do not worry! That is what the Language Zone is here for. In addition to this information, the Educator Zone walks you through how to deliver specific activities for your young SAE language learners. If you are not a local language speaker, it is important to partner with local-language speaking educators or community members (see Partnering with family and community for more advice.)
We can all learn how to support children in their early additional language learning to put them on a positive and respectful pathway to become bidialectal and multilingual speakers, with increasing proficiency in SAE.