Prof. Gillian Wigglesworth is a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne and chief investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language.  She has published widely in both first and second language acquisition as well as bilingualism. Her major research focus is on the languages Australia Indigenous children living in remote communities are learning, and the linguistic challenges the children face as they enter the formal, usually English-based, school system.  She has worked extensively with Indigenous children growing up in these remote communities in both the Northern Territory and Western Australia.  Her focus is on their languages, the complexity of their language ecology, and how these interact with English. Her most recent book, co-edited with Jane Simpson and Jill Vaughan, From Home to School: Language Practices of Indigenous Children and Youth, (Palgrave Macmillan) documents much of this work.

Many Indigenous children in Australia grow up in complex linguistic ecologies where the languages spoken range from the traditional language/s of the area to creoles (widely known as Kriol) and include Aboriginal English varieties as well as Standard Australian English which is the language of education for all children in Australia.
 
In this presentation, I discuss three recent long-term projects in which I have been involved in which different aspects of Indigenous children’s languages are explored to provide a snapshot of the variety of linguistic activities which are being investigated in relation to children’s language. All the children live in communities located in the more remote areas of Australia. In the first community, the children first acquire their traditional language, Murrinhpatha. Here we recorded children aged 7, 9 and 11 telling a narrative from a culturally appropriate picture story book in Murrinhpatha. These were then transcribed and compared with those of English speaking children of the same age telling the same story. 
 
In the second community children are acquiring a koine language resulting from mixing of Yolngu Matha dialects, Dhuwaya. The children attend a bilingual school in which Dhuwaya is taught initial for literacy with English literacy being introduced later in the school.  Phonological awareness is an important skills for learning literacy, but no phonological awareness materials were available. I report here on the development process of an app designed for the school to teach this skill in Dhuwaya.
 
The final project reports on the languages children are speaking in a variety of remote communities across Western Australian where the children’s first language tends to be either a creole or an Aboriginal English with insertions from the local traditional language. Children in eight different schools were recorded in both the classroom and the playground for periods of up to two hours. Following transcription, their language was analysed to examine the children’s linguistic flexibility and their acuity with their languages. The children were competent language users adapting their languages to both place, person and context.