The transmission and dissemination of knowledge in Aboriginal societies for the most part occurs orally in an Aboriginal language or in Aboriginal English. However, whilst support is given to speaking skills in Indigenous communities, in our education system less emphasis is given to developing equivalent oral communicative competence in Standard…

This paper reports on a review of the teaching and assessment of oral language in Western Australian secondary schools. Results show that teachers have considerable difficulty in incorporating oral language tasks into their pedagogy because of a curriculum biased towards developing writing skills. Teachers also revealed that they do not have the…

Investigates how teachers perceive the speech of school-aged children and whether the socioeconomic status or level of schooling of the students influences these perceptions. Findings suggest that teachers' judgments of what is problematic and their perception of what causes these problems may differ according to the socioeconomic status of their…