Practical and research issues

The existence and the importance of Australian creoles and Aboriginal English have long been disputed in public discourse in Australia. Although school systems are beginning to recognize the fact that creoles and Aboriginal English may be coherent linguistic systems, there is still a reluctance to allow them any significant place in the development of school literacy. It is assumed that literacy skills in StE will be best acquired by concentrating only on that variety, despite research evidence of the relevance of home language to effective learning of standard varieties. The better integration of creoles and Aboriginal English into school learning depends on continued research to produce fuller descriptions of these varieties and the development of a greater range of quality learning resources in them.

In parts of Australia where creoles are spoken one practical problem is the differentiation between creole and Aboriginal English. In some cases, the creole speakers have long believed that in speaking creole they have been speaking English. As Aboriginal English in such areas may be (at least in part) describable as a post-creole continuum, there are practical problems in deciding, for educational purposes, where to draw the line between the creole and the English, although the line has been drawn in written language with the development of an alternative orthography for Kriol. The problem of differentiating Kriol from Aboriginal English has implications for the development of learning materials and for pedagogical approaches.

There have been some attempts to describe the patterning of variation between Aboriginal English and creole by employing the concept of the implicational scale. An implicational scale is a continuum of features which form a hierarchy, where each feature can be assumed to apply the existence of features above it. As Blumer (1987: 1) who has been working on such a project puts it, “[o]ne example of implication is the observation that if an Aboriginal creole speaker can pronounce the fricative [th], he/she can and will also pronounce [t]. That is, the presence of the phonetic feature [th] implies the presence of the phonetic feature [t], but not vice versa.” On the basis of implicational analysis of data from over 900 children living in regions close to where Kriol was spoken, Blumer (1987: 14) found that the data fitted “a model implicational scale extremely well”, suggesting that a geographical continuum existed in the area studied. It remains to be seen from further research whether other continua (e.g. socio-economic) can also be traced.