The Kaupapa Māori Turn in Bilingual Education: Te Ara Kahikatea (TransAcquisition Pedagogy) for the Biliterate Teaching of Academic English in Kura Kaupapa Māori

Kura Kaupapa Māori provide an immersion model for children to be educated in the indigenous language of Aotearoa/New Zealand. The exclusive use of the Māori language in [1]kura allows time for it to become the students’... [ view full abstract ]

Kura Kaupapa Māori provide an immersion model for children to be educated in the indigenous language of Aotearoa/New Zealand. The exclusive use of the Māori language in [1]kura allows time for it to become the students’ stronger language before English is added as the ‘other’ language. In many kura, English is introduced in Year 7 however in some kura, English is excluded altogether throughout the first eight years of schooling (Hill and May, 2014, p. 161). This practice of delaying instruction in the ‘other’ language until the target language is established is grounded in the view of sequential bilingualism (Canagarajah, 2007; Cummins, 2000). This paper draws on my doctoral research (Tamati, 2016) to discuss the [2]Ara Kahikatea approach to simultaneous bilingualism and biliteracy as an alternative to the current practices of kura. The Ara Kahikatea approach uses the unique growth pattern of the [3]kahikatea tree as a Kaupapa Māori metaphor to characterise languages as symbolic trees in the mind of the bilingual student, which grow and develop independently and interdependently in the bilingual and biliterate learning process. This metaphor re-imagines Cummins’ (1978) idea of language interdependence as the bilingual’s Interrelational Translingual Network (ITN). The ITN is imagined as an evolving organic web of complex interconnected linguistic and conceptual interrelationships. These interrelationships grow and expand when the bilingual student engages in cross-linguistic transfer to integrate new knowledge with prior knowledge to increase conceptual understanding. The ITN re-imagines how the centralised processing system in Cummins’ (1984) Common Underlying Proficiency model is pedagogically operationalised using [4]Ara Kahikatea in the bi-literate teaching of academic knowledge. This research has wide reaching implications as it is the first to theorise, develop and assess a bilingual pedagogical approach for the reciprocal transfer of concepts, skills, and metalinguistic awareness across languages.

[1] Kura Kaupapa Māori

[2] TransAcquisition

[3] Dacrycarpus dacrydioides

[4] TransAcquisition