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Welcome to ILSA
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Over the past 3 years, Protea Textware Pty Ltd ('Protea'), has been working in partnership with the Nyikina Aboriginal Community in far west Western Australia to create a modern, effective language learning program for the Nyikina language. There are very few remaining speakers of Nyikina, less than 50, mostly of the grand-parent generation, and no intergenerational language learning is currently taking place. Protea, a company established in 1994 to design, develop and publish pedagogically sound interactive multimedia English language and literacy learning programs, has successfully produced some 18 CALL and literacy programs which are highly valued as young adult and adult learning resources worldwide.
The Nyikina program was based on sound pedagogical and language learning principles, utilising language and culture created and selected by the Nyikina community. There are 200 interactive activity modules in the program which teach and test the sounds of the language, vocabulary in context, conversational and cultural expressions, spelling, pronunciation, listening, comprehension, and some basic grammar approaches.
Over the course of the development, new strategies to more effectively teach oral languages were identified and are currently being researched and implemented in this program, and new versions under development for further languages in collaboration with more Aboriginal communities.
Ongoing research and development is carried out in partnership with Aboriginal language communities, and includes:
• Development of pedagogies for oral languages
• Development of an authoring interface for a CALL program for Indigenous languages
If you interested in working with Protea to develop language learning programs in your community, or have other comments or contributions, please contact Virginia Westwood at:
ILSA
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