Cultural Conceptualisations in English Words: A Study of Aboriginal Children in Perth

Abstract

This study explored conceptualisations that two groups of Aboriginal and Anglo- Australian students attending metropolitan schools in Western Australia instantiate through the use of English words. At the time of the study, many educators believed that both these groups of students spoke the same dialect. A group of 30Aboriginal primary school students and a matching group of Anglo-Australian students participated in the study. Thirty-two English words were used as prompts to evoke schemas and categories in participants. The responses were then interpreted using an ethnographic approach toward the identification of cultural conceptualisations. These responses were compared within and between the two groups. The analysis of the data provided evidence for the operation of two distinct, but overlapping, conceptual systems among the two cultural groups studied. The discrepancies between the two systems largely appear to be rooted in the cultural systems that characterise each group while the overlap between the two conceptual systems appears to arise from several phenomena such as experience in similar physical environments. One of the implications of the findings is that a critical defining feature of some varieties of a language may be their conceptual basis, rather than so much their grammatical and/or phonological features. This observation calls for further exploration and perhaps a revisiting of the notion of ‘dialect’.