ACQ Vol 13 no 3 2011

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ACQ Volume 13, Number 3 2011 127
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-