‘Four boys Nga-Lerebina Ngana’: Oracy and translanguaging in English and Ndjébbana

© 2019, AATE - Australian Association Teaching English. All rights reserved. In this paper we take on Green’s (2017) orientation of the Australian Curriculum: English and consider what might it hold for the students of Australia. We set about analysing eighteen minutes of storytelling by a group of young 9–12 year old Kunibídji males from Maningrida in the far North of the Northern Territory in Australia, making this storytelling visible to the readership. In doing so, we note the rhetorical attitude held by these young people and their artful use of discourses as they translanguage between Ndjébbana, English, traditional knowledge, popular culture and mainstream Australian culture. The artful use of discourses demonstrated by these young people highlights their preference to engage in oral storytelling using scaffolds of meaning-making found in digital technological literacies. We argue that all Indigenous students should have the right to learn in their preferred language of communication as part of their linguistic human rights.