Indigenous children living in the more remote areas of Australia where Indigenous languages continue to be spoken often come to school with only minimal knowledge of English, but they may speak two or more local languages. Others come to school speaking either a creole, or Aboriginal English, non-standard varieties which may sound similar to…

The diversity of language in Australia in pre-invasion times is well attested, with at least 300 distinct languages being spoken along with many dialects. At that time, many Indigenous people were multilingual, often speaking at least four languages. Today many of these languages have been lost, with fewer than 15 being learned by children as a…

This study uses the feature sets employed by two automated scoring engines to determine if a "linguistic profile" could be formulated that would help identify items that are likely to exhibit differential item functioning (DIF) based on linguistic features. Sixteen items were administered to 1200 students where demographic information…