Promoting Māori Language in English-Medium Classrooms Through Reading Tasks

Abstract

The past ten years have seen a renaissance for te reo Māori within the New Zealand education system, with increasing opportunities for children to learn Māori at every level. However, insufficient numbers of teachers who are proficient in the language, and limited opportunities for speaking Māori both inside and outside the classroom, have hampered efforts to develop a bilingual education system, so that the future of te reo Māori, in this its country of origin, remains under serious threat. This research puts forward a model for using Māori-language texts and interactive tasks as a means of enabling children to develop their Māori-language proficiency in situations where oral input from a teacher is limited or even absent. It describes how the model was tested on a small group of Māori-speaking children in an English-medium class and highlights aspects of the children's discourse as they worked through the interactive tasks. Test results demonstrate that the children's output in the oral posttests increased by an average of eight utterances and accuracy increased by an average of 14 per cent. An average of eight new content words and five new syntactic processes were incorporated into the children's oral discourse following the six-week intervention. A case is made for the use of varied sources of input including interaction with peers, written text, radio, audio- and videotape to promote te reo Māori in primary classrooms. Samples of reading cards are provided as a basis for the creation of new materials and teachers are encouraged to examine the conditions under which first-language acquisition may be facilitated in order to establish an environment rich in opportunities to listen, speak, read and write in Māori.