Good to Great Schools Australia has partnered with the Guugu Yimithirr Indigenous peoples to launch the first language tutorial of 2021.

In the video, community members Shane Gibson and Sha-lane Gibson use effective teaching strategies to help the audience learn the words for ‘girl, ‘boy’, ‘old woman’ and ‘old man’.

At the start of the tutorial they also revise the keywords learnt in the last lesson from 2020 covering the vocabulary for ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘we’ and ‘you all’.

The video is highly interactive, with Shane and Sha-lane speaking directly to the audience and giving them the opportunity to repeat words after them and even practice with a partner.

Shane said that participating in the project was important to him because language preservation is central to cultural survival.

“Language is the bloodline of culture. Without language there’s no culture,” Shane said.

“It is important to teach our language to the next generation to keep our culture intact,” he continued.

Guugu Yimithirr is one of Australia’s most at-risk Indigenous languages, as there is only a small number of competent speakers and even fewer of those speakers have teaching skills.

Good to Great Schools Australia’s Guugu Yimithirr Language Tutorials project aims to sustain the Guugu Yimithirr language for future generations by assisting speakers to make free online videos that use effective teaching strategies from both Direct Instruction and Explicit Direct Instruction pedagogies.

New videos are shared on Good to Great Schools Australia’s Facebook and YouTube pages weekly.

To learn more about the project or to get involved, contact Good to Great Schools Australia.