The Language Development Of The Maori Schoolchild

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30947, 31 December 1965, Page 4

The Language Development Of The Maori Schoolchild

[Reviewed by DO!

The English Vocabulary and Sentence Structure of Maori Children. By lan H. Barham. New Zealand Council for Educational Research. 72 pp.

The author of this rather slight research monograph iheld the first J. R. McKenzie Fellowship in 1962, 'and worked with the staff of the New Zealand Council for Educational Research and others. The topic is an important one. for if we have accurate and meaningful evidence on the language development of the Maori schoolchild we may be able to do more to raise the achievement level of Maoris in the later years of school and university; without such improvement, claims of racial equality of opportunity have a hollow sound. There have been studies of multilingual children in Wales, in Puerto Rico and elsewhere; research methods for measuring their ability to use English to express ideas and values have been drawn from these sources by Mr Barham. Essentially, this study sets out to compare language usage in children of different ages drawn from Pakeha and Maori families matched for occupational and social status. The Maoris are further subdivided into those from homes where predominantly English was spoken and those from Maorispeaking homes.

In terms of vocabulary’, there is some difference in that Maoris from Maorispeaking homes have smaller English vocabularies, but in sentence construction six to eight-year-olds showed no difference in the three types of i homes compared. The author (concludes that with the meai sures employed, subtle but possibly important differences have not been picked up. In his general summing-up he observes that “our knowledge of the patterns of language development common to New Zealand children cannot be more than superficial and impressionistic.” Nothing emerges from the study to suggest that “the current efforts of many teachers of infant classes to deepen the word experience of Maori children is (sic) unwise or misdirected.” This report is sufficiently dotted with technicalities and specialist terms to make it slow but interesting reading for the layman or even the infant school teacher. But does it justify itself by using relevant precedents in this field intelligently and with foresight? The whole study shows such naivety in the planning stage, and at the point where the results are to be analysed, that it is hardly surprising so little emerged. The references cited are not as recent or as erudite as one would properly expect in a modern study in psycholinguistics: the

intricate problems of sampl. ing have not been fully grasp, ed. and the information collected has the all-too-familiar quality of nose-counting for lack of any better idea what to do: a feature of much educational research where the direction is weak and the project such that it should have been planned on three times the scale or not done at all. We badly need good research studies in the social sciences in New Zealand, but we are not going to get them so long as methods more appropriate to a university thesis of the 1940’s are the best that a research unit can sponsor.