Illustrations of practice

Good afternoon. My name is [name]. I am a Ngarrindjeri man, I am from Meningie. We are meeting on Ngarrindjeri land. I acknowledge the Elders past, present and future. Welcome to Ngarrindjeri country. Thank you.

When I first done it, it made me feel confident, like I was very excited.

I love speaking Ngarrindjeri language with my Nanna and all that, and just, it's fun to talk.

To be honest, I really want to know more about my own culture, my own blood, and learn more about my own language, so then I can tag along with my own mob.

So for our Aboriginal students, the Ngarrindjeri program is a really safe place for them to be. Over time, students have really greatly developed confidence and pride, where they are presenting Welcome to Countries. They will do that in the community as well as the school. So it is a really valuable part to just helping develop a sense of belonging.

There was a time where I was performing the Welcome to Country quite often in Meningie, but Meningie has become a training ground for my students. So I haven't performed a Welcome to Country for a very long time, and they're taking my job, which is excellent. It means I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing, and I'm so proud that they are using the language in a practical sense.

If it's in the morning, we say nankeri nanggo-walun. So that word means good morning. And good afternoon is nankeri gauwel, so that's good afternoon. Good evening is nankeri pangarinda. My favourite word, nankeri pangarinda.

You often hear Ngarrindjeri students sharing language with non-Aboriginal students, and that's assisting in reconciliation. But there's a willingness and an openness from both non-Aboriginal staff and students to learn about the local Aboriginal culture of our area. And it's good to build cultural responsiveness within the site and to build those positive and productive working relationships.

So in 2022, the Ngarrindjeri language program was awarded a South Australian Public Education Award, which was the Aunty Josie Agius Award. And in the same year, we received the SA Credit Union Best Practice Award.

So for the past 4four years, all of the students that have completed the Stage 1 and Stage 2 Australian Languages Revival Language SACE subjects have all received an A grade. And in 2024, one of my students received a merit, an A-plus grade, which was a fantastic achievement not only for himself as a student, but for his whole community and for the Ngarrindjeri community and for the Meningie Area School Ngarrindjeri language program.

And a lot of the students that are learning language here, they're learning more than their parents and their grandparents, and they're actually going home and sharing the language with their families. And I know of one grandmother that cleared the whole front room to have an impromptu Welcome to Country performance. And when she heard her grandchild speaking entirely in Ngarrindjeri, tears filled her eyes.

Within this example, the Year 7 students are studying nga:tjar, totems. Students will choose particular animals, birds, fish, reptiles, or insects to study. The students have selected totems that are important to them. A student chose the Pondi, Murray cod, as it is part of a very culturally significant Ngarrindjeri Dreaming creation story.

Ngurunderi, our creator ancestor, made all of the freshwater and saltwater fish from the Pondi Murray cod. It is an ancestral fish. Another student chose to focus on the Kunggari, Black Swan, as it is an important symbol for her community. Students gain knowledge and awareness of the Ngarrindjer language sound system and are able to use appropriate pronunciation.

Developing proficiency and pronouncing Ngarrindjer language words correctly is a pivotal aspect in the program. The students are continually developing their reading, writing and speaking skills in the language. There are many words in Ngarrindjer that begin with the ng sound.

And this sound is usually found in the middle or at the end of English words, such as bringing or singing. Within the Pondi Murray cod example, the student has taken the verb thumpin, which means hunting, and has added the amaldi suffix. The word amaldi means to be good at something or a particular action or skill. The student has created a new word, a noun, thump-amaldi, which means being good at hunting, a good hunter to highlight the skill of the Murray cod.

Now we're going to have a look at how, again, we're just focusing on that aspect of understanding language and culture and the first sub-strand in that strand, which is Understanding systems of language. So, again, Rita's work is rich in that it covers many aspects of the curriculum, especially when she's talking about students thinking of their ancestral totems, but just for the purpose of showing you how the curriculum works, we're focusing on pronunciation and how the students have been developing their grammar as well.

So once again, we're on that same Language Revival Pathway, but this time we have selected Years 7 and 8. We click on the first sentence in the achievement standard and then this immediately connects to the related content description.

If you look at the content description, you can see already that there's a change from Year 6 or Years 5 and 6 because it's now got a reference to enhancing fluency. And when we were listening to the way Rita was talking about the students connecting the Ng sound and how that works across phrases and words and in a sentence, we can see that there has been a progression in the way she's referencing pronunciation.

So let's have a look at the related elaborations. We have reading aloud for meaning using appropriate intonation, stress and tone to demonstrate comprehension of sound symbol relationships.

And we can see, I won't read the other connections, but you can see that Rita has been working in this way with her students in this example. So now we go on to the next sentence of the achievement standard, which is related to the structure and the grammar. Which again will immediately connect to the related content description.

And this time we're talking about apply understanding of grammatical structures and features to compose and respond to texts. When you think of Rita’s work, that's what the students were doing in constructing those detailed sentences. Once again, she used the elaborations to give her some ideas.

We can remember that the elaborations are not mandated. They're examples that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers came up with in their discussions when they were deciding how does this look in your classroom or on Country experiences of teaching language.

The Year 9 students learn how to use the Ngarrindjeri language dictionary and cross-reference Ngarrindjeri words for translations to create word lists. The students develop skills in reading, writing, speaking, translating, and creating their own authentic and original Ngarrindjeri translations and texts. Within the examples, the students are highlighting how to use suffixes to create new words, such as wangk-amaldar and wruk-amaldar. Wangkun means climbing, wangk-amaldar means a good climber.

Wrukun means swimming. Wruk-amaldar means a good swimmer. Students have also highlighted singular and plural forms.

For example, tiyawi means one goanna and tiyawar means 3 or more goannas. With the sentence for the cat, the student has included an ergative pronoun, transitive and intransitive verbs, and that he saw the cat walking by yesterday. He is using words that are associated with time. The word nakur means saw, which is a past tense.

So this example sentence that is there, nga:ti nakur tanggi ngopun watangerau - I saw a cat walking by yesterday. Once again, we're going through the curriculum that we, this time, we're still on the Language Revival Pathway, but this time we're going to Years 9 and 10, again, because we're working in that sub-strand of Understanding systems of language, it connects to the first sentence. which links to the related content description.

This time the students have moved up. And it's all about applying features and conventions of spoken language to extend fluency. in responding to and creating text in familiar and unfamiliar contexts.

And we can see that Rita has been doing this because she's been encouraging her students to access different resources to be able to extend their language and start creating original texts with quite a bit of detail. And here we link directly to the elaborations, and as you can see, once again, there are 3 elaborations which Rita highlighted in her planning, which helped guide her work to ensure that there was developmental progression in the language in this aspect of the curriculum.

And once again, we then click on the second aspect of that sub-strand in the achievement standard, which hyperlinks. directly to the second content description.

And when we click on the elaborations, Again, we can see that some of the things that Rita was talking about linked directly with these elaborations. For example, in the third one, the third elaboration that's highlighted or has a little circle, we can see that suffixes to verb stems is explicitly mentioned, and that is precisely what Rita was focusing on in this unit.

And this is just the second page again, which really highlights the example that Rita was describing, taking existing words and creating new words with suffixes.