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Phonological awareness is a skill which is crucial in learning to read. In this paper, we report on the challenges encountered while developing a digital application (app) for teaching phonological awareness and early literacy skills in Dhuwaya. Dhuwaya is a Yolŋu language variety spoken in Yirrkala and surrounding areas in East Arnhem Land. Dhuwaya is the first language of the children who attend a bilingual school in which Dhuwaya and English are the languages of instruction. Dhuwaya and English have different phonemic inventories and different alphabets. The Dhuwaya alphabet is based on Roman alphabet symbols and has 31 graphemes (compared to 26 in English). The app was designed to teach children how to segment and blend syllables and phonemes and to identify common words as well as suffixes used in the language. However, the development was not straightforward, and the impact of the linguistic, cultural and educational challenges could not have been predicted. Amongst these was the inherent variation in the language, including glottal stops, the pronunciation of stops, the focus on syllables as a decoding strategy for literacy development and challenges of finding one-syllable words such as those initially used with English-speaking children. Another challenge was identifying culturally appropriate images which the children could relate to and which were not copyrighted. In this paper, we discuss these plus a range of other issues that emerged, identifying how these problems were addressed and resolved by the interdisciplinary and intercultural team.

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This paper focuses on the role of language and some issues associated with identifying appropriate language of instruction for three foundational Maths ideas in the Early Years of schooling. These are considered in relation to the project:Strong Literacy and Numeracy in Communities – Numeracy Component. This had two broad goals, firstly to work with paraprofessional Indigenous teachers to determine an effective language of instruction for specific foundational numeracy concepts and secondly, to create a resource to enable this to be shared. Only two of the project sites are considered here. Both are in Yolŋuicommunities in northeast Arnhem Land, where English is not widely used for interaction. We focus on the use of first language, Djambarrpuyŋu, for the children’s concept development. The English language that can be used is determined by what is possible for early second language learners. We will share some samples of the Djambarrpuyŋu identified for teaching early number ideas. We will describe the process by which suitable expressions for the key ideas in Djambarrpuyŋu were identified and some issues that arose regarding the use of language for comparing numbers. The project showed how ‘Maths’ lessons are a time both for concept development and for language development.