Posted by Richard Hill on October 13, 2011
 

 
Dr Richard Hill, University of Waikato,
Hamilton, New Zealand.
 
 
 
 
New Zealand, or Aotearoa, as named by the Māori people over 1000 years ago, is a multicultural country of 4.4 million people (Statistics New Zealand, 2011).

Māori, the indigenous people and largest minority group, consist of 15 % of the population.

Like the indigenous people of many countries of the world, Māori have suffered from the effects of colonisation, particularly in regard to their language. In 1930, 97 % of Māori spoke their language fluently. By 1970, this number had dropped to 27 %, as a consequence of decades of indoctrination, negative educational policies and changing population movement.

Wanganui High School Maori Language Class, New Zealand – Photo : Robert Thomson (cc)

Introducing Maori in the education system

Buoyed by a growing US civil rights movement of the 1970s and an increasing awareness of the advantages of bilingual education, Māori began to experiment with bilingual education in the late 1970s. In 1982, the first kohanga reo (early childhood language nest) was opened, which then led to a proliferation of Māori-medium providers around New Zealand, including Kura Kaupapa Māori (high immersion elementary schools) and wharekura (secondary schools). In 2011, according to the New Zealand Ministry of Education, 14 % of Māori students (i.e. 24,805 students), are involved in some form of Māori-medium education.

Maori in school, English outside

Despite the huge accomplishments of the past 30 years at bringing the Māori language back to new generations of Māori children, the regeneration of the Māori language has only partially succeeded. Schools are producing fluent Māori speakers but outside school Māori language use is not widespread.

This issue of intergenerational language transmission is the key area that requires attention if the Māori language is to survive in the future. Attending to this will mean that a generation of Māori parents who did not learn Māori as children, will need to first learn it and then work to nurture it in their homes and beyond.

Deciding on the place of English

The place of the English language in high immersion Māori-medium programmes is another issue that schools have continued to struggle with. Its inclusion in the curriculum is even more important since it was recently made a compulsory subject for Māori-medium schools to implement.

In the early years, schools believed that maintaining a 100 % Māori language immersion was necessary to revitalise the language, and that English instruction could be left to secondary schools, or beyond, to fulfil.

However, in the last 10-15 years, attitudes have changed towards a belief that high skill levels are required in both of the students’ languages. How and when to implement English programmes are the issues currently being negotiated. Compared with bilingual programmes in international contexts, the quantity of English language instruction in kura kaupapa and other high immersion programmes is very low, with many schools providing between 120 and 720 hours English instruction between grades 4 and 8.

Schools also tend to employ independent English teachers to instruct the subject rather than utilise the classroom teachers, in the belief that in doing so they are maintaining a ‘pure’ Māori immersion environment elsewhere in the school. While these arrangements offer advantages, employing a separate English language teacher is expensive, and because the English teachers teach solely literacy-related content, the students are not exposed to English language registers from other curriculum areas. The arrangement also means that students are not encouraged to transfer their language skills from one language to the other because their teachers do not usually speak Māori.

At a time when many researchers are promoting instructional techniques that promote language skills transfer, Māori-medium schools have yet to experiment with these methods. It will only occur if perceptions change about the relationship between the students’ two languages. At that point, students will stand a better chance of becoming highly bilingual and biliterate.
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References
Statistics New Zealand. (2011). Estimated Resident Population. from http://www.stats.govt.nz/tools_and_services/tools/population_clock.aspx