School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableCarl Georg von Brandenstein’s legacy: The past in the present(ANU Press, 2017-09-21)Interned as a prisoner of war in Australia in the 1940s, the Hittite specialist Carl Georg von Brandenstein went on to work with speakers of a number of Australian languages in Western Australia. At a time when the dominant paradigms in linguistics were either Chomskyan reductionism or writing a grammar to the exclusion of textual material, Carl followed his own direction, producing substantial collections of texts and recordings in Ngarluma, Yindjibarndi, Nyiyaparli, Ngadju and Noongar, as well as information about a number of other Australian languages. Part of his motivation was to obtain examples to reconstruct what he considered to be the original human language that diffused to all corners of the world, so he put some effort into comparing Australian languages with the classical languages he had previously studied.
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ItemConundrums and consequences: doing digital archival returns in Australia(Sydney University Press, 2019)The practices of archival return may provide some measure of social equity to Indigenous Australians. Yet priceless cultural collections, amassed over many decades, are in danger of languishing without ever finding reconnection to the individuals and communities of their origin. The extensive documentary heritage of Australian Indigenous peoples is dispersed, and in many cases participants in the creation of archival records, or their descendants, have little idea of where to find these records. These processes of casting memories of the past into the future bring various conundrums of a social, political, and technical nature. They raise questions about the nature and dynamics of ongoing cultural transmission, the role of institutional and community archives in both protecting records of languages, song, and social history and disseminating them, and the responsibilities of researchers, organisations, and end users in this complex intercultural space. These questions are perforce framed by ethical and legal questions about access, competing ideas of ownership, and shifting community protocols surrounding rights of access to and the dissemination of cultural information. This paper arises from a project designed to reintegrate such research collections of Central Australian cultural knowledge with the places and communities from which they originally emanated. While we show that the issues raised are seldom neutral and often complex, we also argue for the power that culturally appropriate mobilisation of archival materials has for those that inherit the knowledge they embody.
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Itemi-Tjuma: The journey of a collection - from documentation to delivery(Sydney University Press, 2019)In 2018, a collection of some 60 edited and subtitled films, resulting from a documentation project (2012–2018) in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands on verbal arts of the Western Desert, was ready to be returned to the Ngaanyatjarra community. In this case study, we describe the journey of this return and the cultural, ethical, and technological issues that we negotiated in the process. From the archived collection lodged with PARADISEC (Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures), we developed a workflow that harvested selected media and their associated metadata and transferred them to LibraryBox, a portable digital file distribution tool designed to enable local delivery of media via the LibraryBox wi-fi hotspot. We detail here the return of the curated collection in a series of community film festivals in the Ngaanyatjarra communities and via the delivery of media from LibraryBox to individual mobile phones. We also discuss the return of a digital collection of historical photographs of Ngaanyatjarra people and strategies to re-inscribe such old records for new purposes. These endeavours are motivated by the imperative to ‘mobilise’ our collection of Western Desert Verbal Arts by making the recordings available to the Ngaanyatjarra community. We anticipate that the lessons we learnt in the process will contribute to better design for local solutions in the iterative cycle of documentation, archiving, and return.
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ItemPattern and particularity in a pedagogical genre: The case of an individual teacher(Librairie Garnier, 2015)The pedagogical focus of many genre studies in the field of applied linguistics has produced a wealth of materials designed to raise students’ awareness of the purposes, rhetorical structures, linguistic features, and contexts associated with particular educational genres. The desire to pin down the key characteristics of these genres has also resulted in a conceptualization of genres as rather more stable and constraining/normative than is the case in other disciplines such as literary studies and linguistic anthropology. In this chapter, we report on a rhetorical genre-based analysis of a spoken classroom event in the discipline of architecture - an event that was identified in the current study as both recurrent and patterned. As in many genre studies in the field of applied linguistics, we sought to characterize of the genre for teaching and learning purposes. Less usual was the case study approach adopted here, focusing on one teacher and his use of this classroom genre. A case study approach allowed us to explore the pattern and variability in the teacher’s improvisational pedagogical style. More generally, we want to argue that a study of particularity (in this case of one teacher’s use of a classroom genre) has the potential to contribute to a broader understanding of genre and generic boundaries. The chapter concludes by discussing the pedagogical implications of individual variation as well as underlining the need for a concept of genre in applied linguistics that allows a space to consider the tension between stability and creativity in language use.
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ItemConstruct validity in the IELTS Academic Reading test: a comparison of reading requirements in IELTS test items and in university study(Cambridge University Press, 2012)The study reported here was concerned with the issue of test development and validation as it relates to the IELTS Academic Reading Test. Investigation was made of the suitability of items on the test in relation to the reading and general literacy requirements of university study. This was researched in two ways – through a survey of reading tasks in the two domains, and through interviews with academic staff from a range of disciplines. Tasks in the two domains were analysed using a taxonomic framework, adapted from Weir and Urquhart (1998), with a focus on two dimensions of difference: level of engagement, referring to the level of text with which a reader needs to engage to respond to a task (local vs global); type of engagement referring to the way (or ways) a reader needs to engage with texts on the task (literal vs interpretative). The analysis found evidence of both similarities and differences between the reading requirements in the two domains. The majority of the IELTS tasks were found to have a „local-literal‟ configuration, requiring mainly a basic comprehension of relatively small textual units. In the academic corpus, a sizeable proportion of tasks had a similar local-literal orientation, but others involved distinctly different forms of engagement, including tasks that required a critical evaluation of material (i.e. more interpretative), or which stipulated reference to multiple sources (i.e. more global). The study also found a good deal of variation in the reading requirements across the disciplines. The results of the study are used to suggest possible enhancements to the IELTS Academic Reading Test. A useful principle to strengthen the test‟s validity, we argue, would be to push test tasks, where possible, in the direction of the more „global-interpretative‟ reading modes required in academic study.
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ItemKeeping records of language diversity in Melanesia: The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)(University of Hawaii Press, 2012)At the turn of this century, a group of Australian linguistic and musicological researchers recognised that a number of small collections of unique and often irreplaceable field recordings mainly from the Melanesian and broader Pacific regions were not being properly housed and that there was no institution in the region with the capacity to take responsibility for them. The recordings were not held in appropriate conditions and so were deteriorating and in need of digitisation. Further, there was no catalog of their contents or their location so their existence was only known to a few people, typically colleagues of the collector. These practitioners designed the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC), a digital archive based on internationally accepted standards (Dublin Core/Open Archives Initiative metadata, International Association of Sound Archives audio standards and so on) and obtained funding to build an audio digitisation suite in 2003. This is a new conception of a data repository, built into workflows and research methods of particular disciplines, respecting domain-specific ethical concerns and research priorities, but recognising the need to adhere to broader international standards. This paper outlines the way in which researchers involved in documenting languages of Melanesia can use PARADISEC to make valuable recordings available both to the research community and to the source communities.
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ItemWalking to Erro: Stories of travel, origins, or affection(Asia-Pacific Linguistics, 2015)In this chapter I discuss several stories, mostly recorded at Erakor village in Vanuatu, which have as a theme the relationship between the islands of Erromango and Efate in Vanuatu. They reinforce the observation that the water between islands is a pathway rather than an obstruction to communication, recalling the notion of the Pacific as an interconnected ‘Sea of Islands’ in Hau’ofa’s (2008) terms. Together with this perceived connection between these two islands, linguistic features shared between Erromango and South Efate could be an indication of contact sufficient to lead to innovations in South Efate not found in neighbouring languages to the north. Lynch (2000a:337) concludes that the nature of the relationship between South Efate and its neighbours to the south requires further detailed research and this chapter is offered as a step toward understanding the type of contact there was between Erromango and Efate. I will also be concerned to show that the traditional stories on which this chapter is based are still part of Erakor life, in contrast to our expectation from the literature or from the fact that Erakor is the closest village to the capital city of Vanuatu, Port Vila.
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ItemDaisy Bates in the digital world(EL Publishing, 2016)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableAustralia(Greenwood, 2016)
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ItemIntroduction: Case-based payment systems for hospital funding in Asia(WTO, 2015-11-02)The report focuses on a review of the implementation experience of case-based and DRG mechanisms in the Asia and Pacific region, drawing particularly on research in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, Singapore and Thailand.