supporting tiriti-based curriculum delivery in mainstream early ...

me, wash your hands, and come here. My observations in early childhood
education centres are that when these commands are spoken in either te reo Māori
or English, children generally comply with the command. However, as these are
often spoken in a group situation as part of routines in the centre, children become
used to complying.
The above statistics should be treated cautiously because they are
descriptive and the sample size was small. Nevertheless, together with
observational data and qualitative data derived from journals, interviews, focus
groups, and meeting transcripts, they point towards a relatively common use of te
reo Māori. With the high number of commands being used by many teachers in
this project, it can have te reo Māori appear to be what Ritchie (2007) called “a
bossy language”. Similarly Mitchell and Brooking (2007) reported that commands
were the second highest use of te reo Māori (70% of their respondents). However,
this use of commands may not be surprising as giving and receiving commands has
been identified through the DACOM 4 criteria as a function of language (Hewetson,
2003).
Fifteen years ago, before the final version of Te Whāriki was published,
Stuart (1995) expressed her disquiet that “the language heard in most ECE settings
are greetings, and giving information only, so very conscribed language patterns in
specific settings restrict the modelling of te reo Māori as a living, social taonga” (p.
592).
Despite my own anxiety about the level of te reo Māori I heard, I contend
that teachers learning te reo Māori for use in early childhood education centres are
passing through stages of development and this is part of their journey towards
becoming more competent. In this instance, teachers advanced their skills from the
simple (issuing commands) to more complex actions and language, as the quotes
below demonstrate:
I am studying Te Ara Reo through the Wānanga and am charged to
increase culture and te reo in our centre. We have moved from just
simple commands and waiata to the beginnings of more complex sentence
structure, beginning to read stories in Māori (R. 121).
4 DACOM (Description and Classification of Meetings) as a way of analysing meeting conduct, from a
consistent taxonomy of nine items, one of which is giving and receiving instructions.
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