Volume: 26  Number: 6  Page: 512–532

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue: Australian Aboriginal Students' Schematic Repertoire

Ian G. Malcolm1 and Farzad Sharifian2 1Edith Cowan University, Mount Lawley, Western Australia, Australia and 2School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University, Victoria, Australia

Learning a second dialect entails learning new schemas, and in some cases learning a whole new set of language schemas as well as cultural schemas. Most Australian Aboriginal children live in a bicultural and bidialectal context. They are exposed, to a greater or lesser extent, to the discourse of Australian English and internalise some of its schemas. This may occur in diverse contexts, not only the context of the school. However, Western-based schooling by its nature generally expects students to operate exclusively according to the schemas that underlie the ‘standard’ dialect. An analysis of the discourse of bidialectal Aboriginal children in the South-west of Australia suggests that it exhibits the use of schemas from Aboriginal English (‘something old’), Australian English (‘something new’) as well as parodic uses of Australian English schemas (‘something borrowed’) and schematic blends which may sometimes be dysfunctional (‘something blue’). In this paper, discourse illustrating each of these schema types will be exemplified and discussed in terms of its implications for our understanding of second dialect acquisition and the literacy education of Aboriginal children.

Keywords: schema theory, cultural schema, Aboriginal English, indigenous education, second dialect education

© 2005 I.G. Malcolm & F. Sharifian

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