language – Michmutters

Tag: language

Categories
Australia

Driver training program helps migrants gain license and independence in Launceston

A boy smiling to camera in the foreground, a car with a P plate and a younger boy in the background.

When 18-year-old Afghan migrant Mehdi Safari from Launceston passed his driving test, he was “hopping around” with excitement.

It made it easier for him to travel to his part-time job at a local hardware store, and to school every day.

“Yo puedo [also] go out more with friends, and even when I’m going out to play sport, it’s very helpful to have a license,” he said.

It was also an important milestone for the Launceston Migrant Resource Center’s learner driver program, Drive4Life, as Mr Safari was its 500th participant to pass the P-test.

Coordinator Janice Molineux said it was incredibly significant for those migrants and refugees and their families.

“I was very happy… [and] now it’s 511 [people who have passed]. I just think it’s such a great thing,” she said.

A boy in a hoodie behind the wheel of a parked car.
Mr Safari got a “lecture” from his father about the serious responsibility of driving well.(ABC Northern Tasmania: Sarah Abbott)

license to independence

Arriving in Launceston with his family from the Iranian city of Ahvaz in 2013, Mr Safari said he was passionate about cars and wanted to become a mechanic or engineer since childhood.

“Growing up, I tried to buy toy cars and I’d disassemble them to try to work out how they worked,” he said.

But in Tasmania, once old enough to obtain a driver’s licence, Mr Safari found it a challenge to accrue the required number of hours of practice as a learner driver.

“It was difficult for me to find a car to practise,” he said.

A car provided by the Drive4Life program allowed him to gain the supervised driving practice and skills he needed to get his P-plates.

Odds stacked high

In many ways, Mr Safari and the 510 other migrants who have now passed through Drive4Life have beaten the odds in obtaining a licence, according to Ms Molineux.

“One challenge… is knowing someone with a full driver’s license to help them gain the required hours to sit for their P-test,” Ms Molineux said.

Another is knowing enough English to pass.

A woman with tied back hair smiling to camera, with greenery and a building behind her.
Janice Molineux enjoys seeing Drive4Life graduates driving around town.(ABC Northern Tasmania: Sarah Abbott)

Ms Molineux said some learners who were capable drivers were not able to gain their Ps due to interpreters not being allowed in the car with them during tests.

That restriction was introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Ms Molineux said her organization was working on a proposal to address it.

“We are hopeful that people who are still learning English can acquire their licences. It should not be ‘English first, then a license’,” she said.

“Safety must always come first… [but] you don’t need perfect English to be able to drive.”

Ms Molineux said being able to drive was life-changing for many migrants and refugees living in Tasmania.

“A license lets them gain independence, get to English classes and travel to work where public transport options are not viable,” she said.

Bring your own tutor

Launceston’s Migrant Resource Center started its Drive4Life program in 2009.

The program operates with around ten volunteer driving tutors providing lessons in two dual-controlled cars. The 500 drivers it has helped to gain a license have come from countries ranging from Afghanistan to Sudan.

But the program’s success means it now has a long list of learner drivers waiting to join it, and not enough driving tutors to keep up.

Ms Molineux said it was due to the “battle” of finding driving tutors, particularly bi-lingual ones, that she began a ‘Bring Your Own Mentor’ initiative last year.

“It doesn’t matter where you are on the [learner waiting] list, if you bring someone who’s happy to be inducted as a Drive4Life mentor, then they help you and someone else from the top of the list,” Ms Molineux said.

A man wearing a cap crouched in front of a car that has an L plate on it
Abbas Safari is a fluent Farsi speaker and tutors Farsi-speaking Launceston locals.(ABC Northern Tasmania: Sarah Abbott)

The volunteer tutors go through a driver induction, which involves “some theory, but mostly practice” in a dual-control car with the program’s head mentor.

It was through this initiative that Mr Safari successfully passed his Ps, after being tutored in a Drive4Life car by his father, Abbas.

“With him… teaching me it was alright, because we had that father-son bond and connection, so I was comfortable with him,” Mr Safari said.

“It made the learning experience a bit easier.”

Finally finding their legs

Abbas Safari has gone on to tutor his other son, 16-year-old Milad, and Farsi-speaking Launceston mother-of-nine, Shah Jafari.

He said he enjoyed teaching “very much”, and was motivated to volunteer by his desire to help people in Tasmania’s Afghan community get their license “so they can go on with their lives”.

“Not having a license is like having extra weight on your shoulders,” he said.

A woman in a green headscarf sitting behind the wheel in a car, while a man in the passenger seat smiles to camera too
Shah Jafari looks forward to having her license so she can help with school drop-off.(ABC Northern Tasmania: Sarah Abbott)

Abbas Safari is keen to keep tutoring into the future, and has inspired his older son to one day “definitely” do the same.

“I would like for everyone in the right age bracket to have their license,” Mehdi Safari said.

“Because I experienced that feeling when you get your license and… it’s like you finally find your legs, so you can travel everywhere.”

.

Categories
Australia

Aunty Kathleen grew up having to ‘yarn in secret’. Now she’s helping revive her de ella Indigenous language

Aunty Kathleen grew up having to 'yarn in secret'. Now she's helping revive her de ella Indigenous language

Indigenous people from America and Australia have gathered in the Red Center with the collective goal of saving their languages ​​from extinction.

Native American language experts are sharing their secrets of success in a four-day conference attended by more than 100 people from communities across Australia.

From north-western California, Julian Lang firsthand witnessed the revival of his own native tongue—the Karuk language.

“One person teaches another person and that person becomes a seed for so many more,” Mr Lang explained.

“We wanted to create five new speakers in five years, and three years later we have five new speakers.”

No books needed to revive languages

Twelve Native American revivalists will be sharing the “master-apprentice program” their ancestors developed more than three decades ago.

The program does away with books, pen and paper, and doesn’t rely on a curriculum.

Instead, they speak about everyday things, slowly acquiring words and context.

Indigenous Australians and Native Americans
Indigenous Australians and Native Americans have gathered at the Red Center to learn from each other about how to revive their languages.(ABC News: Xavier Martin)

Julian Lang is one of the founders of the program and said it takes dedication and time — he estimates about three years and 900 hours.

Once an apprentice, now he is teaching Tori McConnell to reconnect more fully with her Karuk culture.

“They used to pick up young native kids and take them to school and strip them of their culture and their language and their identity,” the 22-year-old explained.

“We are reconnecting with who we are in those pieces that the schools and the churches kind of stripped away.”

“We were told never to speak our language again”

This story of language extinction is universal.

Australian government policies actively sought to extinguish Indigenous languages ​​up until the 1970s — like Pertame, also known as Southern Arrernte, originally spoken around the Finke River south of Alice Springs.

Pertame woman, Aunty Kathleen Bradshaw-Swan, recalled how they would yarn in secret when they were children.

Pertame woman Aunty Kathleen Bradshaw-Swan
Pertame woman Aunty Kathleen Bradshaw-Swan was told at school to never speak her language.(ABC News: Stephanie Boltje)

“At school, we were told not to speak that lingo and we were told never to speak our language again,” Aunty Kathleen said.

“My sister Christobel was saying, sometimes she got hit by the headmaster for speaking the language.”

They are two of about 20 people who fluently speak Pertame.

The latest census found 167 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages ​​are still spoken in homes across Australia.

But as many as 110 languages ​​are severely or critically endangered.

“I am sad about our language being taken away in the past but with these people coming there are new beginnings for us,” Aunty Kathleen Bradshaw-Swan told The Drum.

The immersion technique

The UN has declared this next 10 years as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages.

In 2019 Aunty Kathleen and her granddaughter traveled to New York to hear about techniques that could fast-track the learning process, and they liked what they heard about the Master-Apprentice Program.

This one-on-one, or breath-to-breath, immersion technique is being shared at community-led The Pertame School in Alice Springs.

Samantha Penangka Armstrong is helping to run the conference with The Batchelor Institute and is also one of the apprentices.

“It’s reverting back to our old ways where we just only spoke language with our elders,” she said.

Samantha Penangka Armstrong
Samantha Penangka Armstrong is learning Pertame using the Master-Apprentice method developed by Native American language revivalists.(ABC News: Stephanie Boltje)

“It could be asking about a certain plant, what it’s used for, when it’s in season, if animals eat it or if humans eat it, getting the kids up for school — it’s learning Pertame [by speaking] Allow me.”

Through this conference, it’s hoped the next generation across Australia will benefit from the Native American experience.

“It’s really important for them to learn and get their language back,” Samanatha Penangka Armstrong told The Drum.

“It is not only just for their identity, but really ties into connection to country.”

“You can’t go onto country unless you actually speak to country in your own language.”

.

Categories
Australia

Australian researchers develop new communication system inspired by rare NT Aboriginal language Jingulu

Australian researchers develop new communication system inspired by rare NT Aboriginal language Jingulu

An Australian Aboriginal language only spoken by a handful of people in the Northern Territory has become the inspiration for a new artificial intelligence system, potentially helping people better communicate with machines.

Jingulu is considered an endangered language that’s traditionally spoken in the Northern Territory’s Barkly region.

A study, recently published in the academic journal Frontiers in Physics, suggests it has special characteristics that can easily be translated into commands for artificial Intelligence (AI) swarm systems.

“Maybe one of the most powerful things with Jingulu [is] that it gives us the simplicity and flexibility which we can apply in lots of different applications,” lead researcher at University of New South Wales Canberra, Hussein Abbass, said.

AI swarm systems are used in machines to help them to collaborate with humans and undertake complex tasks than humans command them to do.

The silhouette of a man in front of a wall of digital characters/screens
Experts say Australian law is not up-to-date to sufficiently regulate the rising use of artificial intelligence. (Chris Yang: Unsplash)

Dr Abbass said he stumbled on the Jingulu language by accident, while developing a new communication system.

“When I started looking at the abstract, it didn’t take much time to click in my mind about how suitable it is, for the work I do on artificial intelligence and human AI teaming,” he said.

Language easily translatable into AI commands

Dr Abbass said it was normal for AI researchers to draw on different forms of communication for their work, including other human languages, body language and even music.

.