Being bilingual in a diocese where English is the dominant language and Indigenous languages are encouraged in local churches. Some issues for policy.

Rev. Dr Joy Sandefur

Language and Literacy Coordinator Nungalinya College.

Joy is seconded to the Anglican Diocese of the Northern Territory of Australia and is supported by Bush Church Aid Society of Australia.

For many Indigenous Anglicans in the Northern Territory of Australia reading material sent out by the Diocese is like wearing pair of dark sunglasses and reading a book in a dimly lit room.  They can read many of the words but what is being said eludes them or leaves them confused. The readers can recognize many of the words but the way they are used is a mystery.  They call this language high English or hard English and sometimes it is called secret English. These same people would be identified by their Indigenous peers as knowing English and several Indigenous languages. The difficulty is that people from the dominant culture assume that the English these Indigenous people speak is standard English with all its technical words and complexities. The type of English that most of them speak is best identified as plain English.

In this paper I am writing specifically about my experience in the Anglican diocese of the Northern Territory and at Nungalinya College in Darwin. Nungalinya is a college that provides training for adult Indigenous Australians in Theology, Church Leadership and in Family and Community Studies. The Anglican, Catholic and Uniting Churches have combined to provide this Ecumenical College.

For many years I have heard Indigenous Australians complaining about the difficulties they have in understanding English. This has been highlighted working at Nungalinya College where I have assessed the English ability of many students and tutored them in their studies. Many of them find the language of a number of the resources too difficult to read.  Some can read it but find by the end of the paragraph they have forgotten what was said in the previous paragraph.  It is just words. The same is true of written communications sent out from the diocese. Some can follow the oral English used by staff at Nungalinya and in the diocese, others are overwhelmed by it. 

The success of oral communication in English at Nungalinya and in the diocese varies according to how well speakers have adjusted what they are saying to their audience. This means for example avoiding jargon and academic forms of English. When Indigenous Australians who speak English as a second language are able to comprehend what is being said they call it ‘easy English’ meaning plain English and not English that has been dumbed down. It also often means that the speaker has taken care to speak a little more slowly than usual, giving people to time to process and think about what they have heard. 

This is a disappointing state of affairs in a diocese that is this year celebrating 100 years since the first missionaries arrived and a College that was established in 1974 specifically to provide appropriate training for church leaders and members of their communities. For many years the diocese, recognizing that spiritual matters and worship are best done in the local language has encouraged Indigenous churches to conduct services in the vernacular and has supported Bible translation in four languages. The Kriol language has the whole bible available. Two other languages are close to having the New Testament. Some liturgies have been translated.  Beyond this focus there has not been a lot done to facilitate communication between people in the diocese who speak different languages.

Although the diocese has focused on the four main languages used by its Indigenous churches English is nevertheless the dominant language of the Northern Territory and the language of gatherings of the whole church. The majority of the diocese speaks English as their first or only language. It is often the language of communication and teaching at Nungalinya College, because in a class of students from different areas English is the only common language. Materials sent out by the Diocese and the College are written in Standard English with few exceptions.

This raises the question ‘Why have so few Indigenous Australians in this part of Australia acquired fluency in Standard Australian English?’ there are a number of reasons for this.

1. Literacy is a recent phenomeon.

Aboriginal languages that have existed for thousands of years had no written form.  Some early work by missionaries was done in some languages giving them a written form and a few people taught to read. However it is only in the last fifty years that there has been serious attention given to giving these languages a written form and teaching  people to read in them.

 The concept that a language can be written down and then read is still a new idea for many people. The oral languages use a lot of redundancy and much of what has been written in the vernacular reflects this as it takes time for a written style to emerge.

When people for whom English is a second language are given English material to read they find the lack of redundancy a problem and that the written English is too dense and difficult. The skill of reading and writing in their own language or in English is still a new one that many have not mastered.

2 Lack of exposure to English

The Indigenous churches of the Diocese (and most of the students of Nungalinya) are located in remote communities where the vernacular languages are used for almost all purposes. These communities are usually hundreds of kilometers from the nearest towns where English is the dominant language. They are often cut off from the rest of the Northern Territory during the wet season with only expensive air transport as a means of leaving the community.

Outside of the school, there are not many opportunities to speak and hear English. In interacting with the shop, the clinic, council office the first point of contact is with another Indigenous person speaking the same language. Television and videos are available but much of this medium can be understood by following the visual cues and not taking much notice of the English audio. There are few people who are willing or able to take the time to practice English with Indigenous people after work. This results in few opportunities to use and practice English.

There are few Australians who realize how linguistically different Aboriginal languages are from English. The differences make it difficult for Indigenous Australians to learn English. It is also a challenge for white Australians to learn Aboriginal languages.  Over the years only a few missionaries and diocesan workers have learned an Aboriginal language and have focused their work on bible translation and related materials in the languages they have learnt.

While the difficulty of communicating in English has been known for a long time, little has actually been done about working at communicating in English in a way that Indigenous people understand.  Very few staff have acquired the ability to speak in plain English. They have acquired this skill through a desire to communicate.

Two recent workshops in 2007 for Indigenous clergy have been run by people who are able to speak plain English and discussion by the participants has been encouraged in the Indigenous languages.  These workshops have been warmly welcomed by the participants with a request for more workshops.

3. Failure of the school system

A further reason for lack of SAE in remote communities is due to the fact that the school system has failed most people. In an interview with Marcia Langton, one of Australia’s leading black intellectuals, Luke Slattery reports on her concern for

Aboriginal children who are not receiving sufficient education. Marcia commented that only 27% of year 7 students in remote communities met the National Literacy Benchmark[1].  Poor attendance, especially in remote communities, ‘continues to thwart teachers and principals. Aboriginal kids perform poorly on the national benchmark tests for literacy and numeracy. Often trailing four years behind white kids, they rarely catch up’[2]

My work at Nungalinya leads me to agree. I assess the English level of adult students.  They come in for the Certificate in Community Studies, which is taught bilingually. They regularly claim to have attended school for 12 years but can barely pen two sentences in English. They want to learn English but are reluctant to enrol in intensive courses in Darwin due to the time required away from home to complete the course. Theology students often have a better level of English, but it is still far from adequate for coping in an environment where English is the dominant language.

There have been bilingual programs in the remote community schools but these have been reduced as funding declined, or new school principals came who saw no need for bilingual education. Marcia Langton like many others argues that bilingual programs were never implemented properly[3]. Also many schools have not had an ‘English as a Second Language’ teacher. Small one or two teacher schools have had no chance of having such a teacher.

Students and families find it very difficult to send their children hundreds of kilometers away, for secondary schooling  and many children find it too difficult to complete secondary school due to homesickness and difficulty in mixing with children from other communities.  The NT Education Department is now building Secondary schools in the larger communities but there are many difficulties in offering a range of subjects in a small secondary school

All of this has resulted in several generations of adults with poor oral and literacy skills in English. This marginalizes them not only in the wider church but also when relating to government entities, medical services and employment opportunities.

There is also a social pressure against using SAE. An Aboriginal woman who has enrolled in an intensive course in English this year, told me that she has to be careful where she speaks ‘proper’ English as people will think she is trying to make herself higher or better than others. There is also a resistance to being perceived as trying to behave and live as a white person.

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At Nungalinya College students come from all over Australia and speak many different languages.  The languages range from Kriol to Standard Australian English and Indigenous languages from all over Australia that are not related to one another or English.  There is a growing number of staffs who speak an Indigenous language and teach in it. However this only works when you have a homogenous group who speak the same language as the teacher speaks. Many classes have students from several different languages who do not understand each other’s language. By default or when a teacher only speaks English, the language of teaching must be English.

Nungalinya is a college for adults and has schools in Community studies and Theology.  The Community Studies School attracts more students and they have been able to bring in enough students in the languages that their staff speak, and teach bilingually.  Theology students come from a larger range of languages and so often English is the language used in order to find some common ground. Students often complain that the written materials that are provided use ‘hard’ English that they do not understand properly and that staff use too many difficult words that they do not understand. This inhibits learning. Where it is possible to teach in a language that all students understand well, there is of course a corresponding greater depth of understanding of the subject being taught. Nungalinya teaches most of its courses by intensive units so that students are able to focus on one subject at a time. This reflects the Indigenous learning style and also facilitates part time study.

The challenge facing Nungalinya College and the diocese is that many of the indigenous languages spoken are small language groups from less than a thousand to several thousand speakers. The only exception is Kriol which is thought to be the first or second language 30,000 people.  While both the College and Anglican diocese believe that the best medium of worship and spiritual matters is in the local language people speak as their mother tongue they still have the problem of how to communicate between the minority Indigenous churches and the wider church which speaks Standard Australian English. Nungalinya and the diocese need to make use of both written and oral communication. The small numbers of speakers of these languages means there are not the resources to produce all written communication in their languages. Many Aborigines tell us that they see the solution to this problem as everyone using plain English orally and written materials being in plain English.

What do they mean by plain English? They describe it as not using difficult words. They say they find it easier to understand when there are short sentences in the active voice and passive constructions are avoided. When simple words are used and jargon or complex words are avoided. Difficult words when they need to be used should be clearly defined or instead the concept is explained and taught.

Aboriginal people have on a number of occasions told me when I have tutored them that the English used in their course materials is too difficult to understand. That they do not know high English and that the words are too hard. There are several things that contribute to this apart from the fact that a number of the words are new vocabulary

• Written English is dense, and uses short sentences that when unpacked can contain a lot of meaning.  We use what Indigenous people regard as difficult words because they carry so much meaning and we can write shorter sentences.  Whereas Australian Indigenous oral languages contain a lot of redundancy and the written prose can be lengthy as it still includes a lot of redundancy.

• Many grammatical features of English are not understood by people with a lower level of English and literacy.   Words such as ‘how’, ‘although’, ‘too’ ‘were’ or ‘also’, are not understood and this results in the text being wrongly understood or being understood in a fragmentary way. 

• Speakers of Aboriginal languages are unfamiliar with the grammatical passive construction as their languages do not contain passive constructions. Sentences written in the passive voice, such as ‘The ball was hit by Tim’ are readily misunderstood and can disguise the agent and subject of verbs. The above example is much clearer to Indigenous Australians when it is written in the active voice. ‘Tim hit the ball.’

• When they listen to oral English speech they often comment that it is too fast. When the speaker slows their speech a little, and pronounces words clearly thinking about the words they are using much more is understood. It also gives the listener time to process what they have heard

The Indigenous people advocating the use of plain English are aware that this is not the complete solution. But for those who have little opportunity to learn Standard Australian English it would result in better communication.

I have worked on 2 projects that set out to use plain English. They are a Bible Dictionary for the use of Indigenous Australian students, and a book that gives an overview of the Old Testament. These have received a good response.  The American distributor of the dictionary views this book as having a wider readership than in Australia, When a brave person put Roberts Rules of meetings into Plain English many non Aboriginal members of synod understood the process better.  If all materials sent out by the diocese and used by Nungalinya were in plain English the Aboriginal churches and their members would have a better understanding of the material.  There would still be gaps but not as many.

This kind of language does not have to be condescending or childlike.  It will take a few more words if difficult words are defined and the concept explained, but Indigenous Australians see it as a way forward out of a situation in which they are marginalized. Last week I was discussing communication with members of the church at Umbakumba on Groote Eylandt.  They strongly supported the idea of material coming from the Diocesan office be in plain English. They would also like to see Indigenous interpreters used at gatherings of the whole diocese.

Recognizing that people from remote communities are usually bilingual in plain English and not standard Australian English would clarify our thinking about how we communicate with them. A way forward that would include Indigenous Australians and not exclude other Australians would be through the development of a policy for better communication. There is a need for both Nungalinya and the Diocese to have a practical language communication policy.

This policy for the Anglican diocese of the Northern Territory should include the following:

• Continue to encourage Indigenous congregations to worship in their own language and make use of what resources they have available in their Language.
• Where appropriate encourage Diocesan workers to learn an Indigenous language and gain knowledge of Indigenous Society and how it functions.
• Documents sent to the Indigenous churches should be written in plain English.
• When the Synod meets or there is a Diocesan conference members from the Arnhem Land churches should come for a workshop a day early so that the major issues can be discussed in plain English. This would give them a clear understanding of the issues and enable them to participate in what is happening.
• The Diocese should explore the use of Interpreters where there is an Aboriginal person who has or can obtain the appropriate skills.
• Encourage Indigenous church leaders to learn Standard Australian English so that they can make use of the wider resources available in English and communicate well with the rest of the Diocese and Australian church.
• All people speaking at synod, conferences or when writing motions should be encouraged to leave jargon out of their speech and use language that is more accessible to Indigenous Australians.
• Hold a biennial workshop in using plain English.
• New diocesan staff working with Indigenous people should receive assistance in communicating in plain English.

If the above became the policy of the Diocese it would result in a church where

Indigenous Australian Christians felt more included and that they too could have a say in what is being discussed.  An inclusive church is a church where all members, as Christ taught us, are respected regardless of race or background.  One of its characteristics is that it makes every effort to communicate with all members. This should be an outcome of obeying Jesus command to love one another.

A language policy for Nungalinya could include the following.

• Indigenous languages to be used for teaching where possible.
• Resources in Indigenous languages such as dictionaries, scripture and other materials to be used when it is appropriate to do so.
• New student materials to be written in plain English.
• Staff to receive assistance in teaching and communicating in plain English
• Students to have access to intensive courses in English.

Listening to what Indigenous Australians are telling us about the difficulties they have with English and how it marginalizes them, and doing something about it, would result in much better communication between Indigenous church members and the rest of the diocese. It would result in a far more inclusive church. The same would be true for Nungalinya students and the White staff and others who work with them. Good communication always results in better understanding, relationships and academic outcomes.