Professor Sharynne McLeod on Keeping Origin Language alive

“One of the things we do as speech pathologists is encourage families to maintain their home languages. Because this increases the children’s ability to belong, to be part of their communities.” - Professor Sharynne McLeod

Sharynne McLeod is a speech-language pathologist and professor of speech and language acquisition at Charles Sturt University

In the sidelines of Speech Pathology awareness week (21-27 august), NITV Radio spoke to Professor Sharynne McLeod, speech-language pathologist and professor of speech and language acquisition at Charles Sturt University exploring the importance of keeping origin language alive.

In our conversation we also explored key findings of her research: Celebrating young Indigenous Australian children's speech and language competence.

The research shows that Indigenous Australian children can easily take on up to 8 languages.

A research shows that Indigenous Australian children can easily take on up to 8 languages Source: iStockphoto / Kalinovskiy/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Some key elements of the study

•Describes 692 Indigenous Australian children's language competence.

•Children spoke between one and eight languages: English, Indigenous languages, creoles, foreign languages, and sign languages.

•Children who spoke an Indigenous language were more likely to live in moderate to extreme isolation.

•Language environments were rich. Family members and friends told stories, read books, and listened to the children read.