Regions: Yakanarra
Yakanarra Community is situated on a small excision on Gogo Station, and lies approximately 80 kilometres south of Fitzroy Crossing in the Kimberley region of WA.
The Community was first established in 1989 and now has approximately 150 residents. Yakanarra has twenty-three (23) community houses, seven (7) staff houses, a store/office complex and a health centre which were constructed between 1993 and 2002. The independent school was established in July 1990 and currently caters for approximately 30 primary students and up to 20 junior secondary students, in five classes. The school also runs an itinerant students' class ('visiting school') for children visiting extended family in the community. In 2001, a small Adult Education Centre was established as an annexe of Karrayili Adult Education Centre, Fitzroy Crossing. Students here are predominantly completing the Certificate in General Education for Adults although there are some who are now completing diploma level studies with Notre Dame University, Broome.Yakanarra has a complex language ecology: the participants in the study have Walmajarri as their traditional language, Kimberley Kriol as their language of general use, and are exposed to standard English. People in Yakanarra are multi-lingual, and shift with varying degrees of facility between these three languages. Such language shift is largely determined by situational factors that include location, purpose, participants and language skills.
The Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition (ACLA) project at Yakanarra commenced in 2003. Its central focus has been a longitudinal study of some twelve children (aged between two and four) and the caregivers, relatives. friends and community members who make up their linguistic world. The project follows these children over three years and will provide data for the overriding ACLA research questions about the nature of the children's language input, the effect of this on their language acquisition and their productive output, and the processes of language shift, maintenance and change which may be hypothesised to result from this multilingual environment. A particular focus of the Yakanarra research, however, will be the role of questions in the interactions between the children and their interlocutors. Researchers in education and linguistics (Harris 1990, Eades 1993) have argued that the Aboriginal learning paradigm has little place for direct questions and in particular that the concept of 'false' or iterative questions, questions to which the enquirer already knows the answer, is unfamiliar to Aboriginal children. Much of this research is based on impressionistic language data; indeed, there is very little corpus-based or quantitative data on pre-school age indigenous children's language. The data collected at Yakanarra will be used to describe and analyse the nature of the questions asked of and by children and the responses that accompany such questions.
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