JCPSLP Vol 14 No 1 2012

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JCPSLP Volume 14, Number 1 2012 55
Cultural diversity
Pearce, W., & Stockings, E. (2011). Oral narratives
produced by Aboriginal Australian children: Dilemmas with
normative comparisons. ACQuiring Knowledge in Speech,
Language and Hearing , 13(3), 126–131.
Dr Judith Gould
Speech Pathologist
APY Lands, DECD
20 Beatty Terrace, Murray Bridge, SA 5253
phone: +61 8 8532 0700
email:
Promoting an evidence base supporting the
linguistic competence of Indigenous children
Thank you for the latest issue of ACQuiring Knowledge in
Speech, Language and Hearing (ACQ) around Cultural
diversity (Volume 13, Number 3, 2011) and highlighting the
complexities of working with children of differing cultural
and linguistic backgrounds to our own. As somebody who
has worked in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
communities for a number of years, I read many of the
articles with interest to see how our profession is
progressing regarding assessment and intervention
practices with Indigenous children.
As Cori Williams rightly identifies, there is a need to
progress our evidence base to support improved practice
with Indigenous children. How we go about this is critical
in upholding the rich linguistic environments of these
children and Petrea Cahir’s literature review provides many
examples of why this is important and what has not worked
in the past. Pearce and Stockings attempt to expand our
knowledge of the narrative skills of Indigenous children by
comparing them with existing (American) normative data,
which underestimates the children’s language proficiency.
As they identify, there is the need to build on this study to
“ensure optimum accommodation of cultural differences
in communication style” (p. 130). Hence this would involve
assessing children under conditions that enable them
to demonstrate the true extent of their language skills
in Aboriginal English, by providing culturally appropriate
activities (e.g., purposeful activities rather than use of
display questions) in culturally appropriate contexts (e.g., in
a group of children facilitated by an AE-speaking adult).
As a profession that promotes itself as “communication
experts” it is essential that we step outside of the comfort
zone of English standardised assessments and tools and
begin relying on our skills and knowledge of language to
explore children’s true communication competence and
not only their ESL skills. We need to work in partnership
with communities, local language experts, linguists, and
interpreters to develop means of assessing children’s home
language in ways that fit their cultural worldview.
Instead of repeating our old ways of “near enough is
good enough” we can look to our own colleagues who are
developing other ways of assessing Indigenous children
Conducting speech pathology assessments with
Aboriginal children: What evidence are we
seeking and why are we seeking it?
While I concur with Pearce and Stockings’ (2011) assertion
that, “there is a clear need for ongoing research to
investigate the characteristics of oral narrative produced by
Aboriginal children across many regions of Australia” (p.
127), the authors have designed a research methodology
which cannot sufficiently address this research topic.
Research is required that assists speech pathologists in
understanding how to assess the communication
development of Aboriginal children in a way that reflects
who the children are as communicators in their own right.
The research evidence currently indicates that by
engaging with the child’s speech community, by working
in close collaboration with Aboriginal co-workers, by
designing assessment methodologies that reflect the
home language and cultural environment of the child,
and by using comparative data which also reflect the
home language environment of the child, accurate
descriptions of communicative competence for individual
Aboriginal children are able to occur (cf Gould, 2009).
Conversely, assessment methodologies which evaluate
the communicative competency of Aboriginal children by
utilising Standard English (SE) – based assessment, by
comparing performance with SE normative data and by
not examining the total communication system of the child
fail to provide sufficiently valid and reliable assessment
information (cf Gould, 1999). Pearce and Stockings (2011)
do raise the importance of considering the ways Aboriginal
English (AE) and Standard Australian English (SAE) differ
in terms of grammatical features. It is important to expand
this discussion and also consider how differences between
AE and SAE may impact communication in a number of
different ways within an assessment situation (cf Gould,
2009).
Speech pathologists require research evidence that
describes Aboriginal children as communicators in their
own right in order to avoid the use of deficit language
such as “lack of”, “reduced”, “omits” to describe what are
in fact simply language features. We can avoid dealing
with dilemmas with normative comparisons by not using
SE data and assessment methodologies when assessing
Aboriginal children.
References
Gould, J. (1999). An evaluation of assessment instruments
in the measurement of the spoken communication skills of
rural Aboriginal children (Unpublished Master’s thesis).
Australian National University.
Gould, J. (2009). The interaction between developmental
assessment, deficit thinking and home language in the
education of Aboriginal children (PhD thesis). University of
South Australia.
Letters to the editor