Numbers and languages

When my children became initiated in the arts of school homework, they welcomed assistance from us parents in revising, among other things, their times tables. It didn’t take me long to start suspecting serious innumeracy in all three children: they took unsettling amounts of time to reply to my questions, whether toughie ones like Seven times eight...? or easy-peasy ones like Three times two...?

It took me a bit longer to realise that the problem had nothing to do with number skills, and all to do with languages: I naturally used Portuguese in these drilling sessions, but the children were learning their times tables in English, their school language, and were therefore computing the sums in this language. Which meant that they had to mentally translate my questions into English, and then re-translate the answers into Portuguese, which does indeed take ages. Which in turn meant immediate revision of home language policies: English became the language of homework, because homework comes in tongues. Part 3, ‘Acquiring a Third Language’, of my book Three is a Crowd? has more on multilingual division (and revision) of language-based labour.

Now, you may be wondering that the reason I naturally used Portuguese to drill times tables was that this is “the language in which I count”, since I am Portuguese. Well, not really. First, my times tables became forever etched in my brain in both Portuguese and French, through similar school-bound drilling. I used Portuguese with my children because this is the default mummy-child language in my home. Second, there’s no denying that numbers associate with languages, because everything else that matters to us does, too. But not necessarily with a single language: numbers, like homework, also come in tongues. In my case, for instance, I can only recall phone numbers (or recipes, for that matter) in the language in which I memorised them. Ask me to tell you, say, a Swedish phone number in another language, and watch me jotting it down in mental Swedish so I can read it to you in spoken non-Swedish, much like my children were doing with their times tables. And third, language names and nationality names don’t designate coextensive concepts, and never have. It makes as much sense to ask South Africans or Singaporeans which language they count in, as it does those of us who happen to have a nationality which happens to have the same name as a language.

Most of us know our times tables – and our other sums – in the language(s) in which we were made to drill them, in school. Whatever we learn in school, number goodies included, we learn through some language. Unless we want to claim that school-trained behaviours represent “the” essence of overall multilingual cognition, and that the language(s) of schooling play “the” core role in it, I don’t see the relevance of questions like In which language do you count? for our understanding of multilingualism. Several years ago, Marguerite Malakoff made this clear in The effect of language of instruction on reasoning in bilingual children.

Numbers, it turns out, aren’t essential to our languages, because numbers aren’t essential to human beings.

Numbers rule?

Image © clipartheaven.com

The interesting questions are whether numerical skills relate to numbers at all. For example, does numeracy depend on command of number words? Researching Numerical thought with and without words: Evidence from indigenous Australian children, Brian Butterworth and colleagues compared numerical concepts of child speakers of languages with restricted vs. broad number-related vocabularies, to find no correlation between numerical thought and number words, a finding that they extend to claims about adult numeracy and vocabularies. Christine Nicholls also turned to child users of Australian languages, to show that numbers aren’t at the core of mathematical reasoning (even discounting the common confusion between arithmetic and mathematics). Quoting from her article It’s time we draft Aussie Rules to tackle Indigenous mathematics, “Aboriginal mathematical systems are largely founded upon spatial relationships rather than on numbers, which is the case in Australia’s dominant culture.”

“Dominant culture” is the key phrase here. The association of numeracy and/or maths skills with languages which feature number vocabularies, and are featured in mainstream schooling, draws on misguided and misguiding dominant, Western, monolingual models of language use and language education. So does the related assumption in meaningless questions like In which language do you X?, where X variously stands for “higher-level”, “fundamental”, “spontaneous” and/or “emotional” exponents, believed to be descriptive of what we are, such as thinking, dreaming, swearing or being miserable and happy.

Finally, in case you’re feeling that something is surely missing here, because numbers must lay bare essential findings about us in that they’re factual and therefore indisputable, then don’t: numbers are no more than what we do with them – whatever our languages. Darrel Huff said so in his enduring pearl of a book, How to Lie with Statistics, and so did Sebastian Wernicke in his TED Talk Lies, damned lies and statistics.

I’ll keep to ways of deceiving, in my next post.

Butterworth, B., Reeve, R., Reynolds, F., & Lloyd, D. (2008). Numerical thought with and without words: Evidence from indigenous Australian children Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105 (35), 13179-13184 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0806045105

Malakoff, M. (2008). The effect of language of instruction on reasoning in bilingual children Applied Psycholinguistics, 9 (01) DOI: 10.1017/S0142716400000436

© MCF 2013

Next post: Multilingual liars. Saturday 2^nd November 2013.

Speech-language clinics: cultural meeting places?

When our children are referred to speech-language services, the least of our concerns is probably to muse on whether the clinic is a suitable venue for cultural happenings. We go there to seek expert assistance, that’s all. Expertise, however, isn’t absolute, because experts aren’t abstract beings. Like the rest of us, they’re shaped by cultural backgrounds and professional training which are bound to specific places and specific times.

Clinical observations leading to diagnoses start at the clinic’s door: Does the child greet new people, and show appropriate curiosity about new surroundings? Does the child say please or thank you, which speakers of languages with words for please and thank you take as a sure sign of basic politeness? Is there telltale body language? How about body contact? If the child shuns an open, extended, unfamiliar hand, or recoils at that hand patting cheeks or ruffling hair, is this culturally odd? What if the same hand insists on heaping dolls, teddy bears and other lifeless representations of living beings near a child who’s scared witless of these things because they’re associated with taboo meanings?

We may all know, in theory, that the same behaviour can be interpreted in widely different ways, but we may not realise that “invisible” cultural considerations, those that we take for granted because they shape our routines, impact clinical observation and assessment: is avoidance of eye contact, for example, a sign of social impairment or of deference? What about silence? The verdict rests with the clinician. The excellent news about this is the growing awareness, among speech-language clinicians, of cultural considerations concerning their little multilingual clients.

Many speech-language clinicians are trained to use a single language of intervention, and receive no training in matters of multilingualism and multiculturalism. There may be no shared language between clinician and client, for example, or no shared ways of using it. One common practice is to ask the parents to interpret, or hire an ad hoc interpreter. A previous post explains why the former solution cannot work, and other research explains what is involved in proper training of clinical interpreters, who aren’t simple, “neutral” vehicles of messages in different languages. See, for example, Claudia V. Angelelli’s book Medical Interpreting and Cross-cultural Communication.

There may also be a shared language, though no normed assessment instruments for other languages used by child clients. Translation comes to mind, here, too: speech-language clinicians do report that they themselves translate and/or adapt instruments which were normed for other languages. But doing so in fact invalidates the standardisation of these tests, making them unusable. Rhea Paul and Courtenay Norbury’s book, Language Disorders from Infancy through Adolescence provides a thorough review of these issues. Elizabeth D. Peña, in an article titled ‘Lost in translation: methodological considerations in cross-cultural research’, raises an additional issue. Neither the instruments were devised to be translated, nor what is in question is the accuracy of a translation: translated tests yield “different patterns of response” in different languages, which “may be due to differences in cultural interpretation” (p. 1257).

We can’t translate languages without translating cultural practices, in other words, because languages are there to serve them. Margaret Friend and Melanie Keplinger, in a study on ‘Reliability and validity of the Computerized Comprehension Task (CCT)’, discuss their adaptation of a vocabulary test from (American) English to (Mexican) Spanish, which they used to assess Mexican infants. The task required the children to grasp an object, when prompted with the word for that object. All children failed this task, arousing suspicion of language delay, compared to their American peers. The cause of the failure, as it turned out, was not language, but culture. When questioned about possible reasons for their children’s results, the Mexican parents clarified that they forbid their children to touch things that do not belong to them.

Other recent research reports on growing awareness of cultural issues arising in speech-language clinics. From Australia, in ‘Speech-language pathologists’ assessment and intervention practices with multilingual children’, Cori Williams and Sharynne McLeod found that clinicians actively sought information about their clients’ languages and cultural backgrounds, faced with a lack of culturally appropriate tools which would do justice to them. Lack of culturally appropriate resources for assessment and intervention is also the case in the US, as Mark Guiberson and Jenny Atkins discuss in ‘Speech-language pathologists’ preparation, practices, and perspectives on serving culturally and linguistically diverse children’. Finally, in a review of clinical practices in multilingual settings worldwide, ‘Towards evidence-based practice in language intervention for bilingual children’, Elin Thordardottir observes that “Existing clinical methods have largely been developed within Western middle-class cultures” (p. 532). In multilingual settings, clinicians are not only being required to interpret what they’re unfamiliar with but, perhaps as crucially, they’re realising that they must stop mistaking what they’re familiar with for “norms”.

Several of my own contributions to this issue focus on monocultural and monolingual features of clinical approaches to speech and language. One book chapter titled ‘Sociolinguistic and cultural considerations when working with multilingual children’ discusses clinical practices which take culturally-bound ‘mono’ tenets as default behaviour. Another chapter, ‘Assessing multilingual children in multilingual clinics’, in my book Multilingual Norms, reports on the consequences of monolingual training on the practices of multilingual clinicians.

The next post will have some more to say about small children and their well-being, namely, what does it mean to “teach” children?

Friend, M., & Keplinger, M. (2008). Reliability and validity of the Computerized Comprehension Task (CCT): data from American English and Mexican Spanish infants. Journal of Child Language, 35 (01). DOI: 10.1017/S0305000907008264

Guiberson, M., & Atkins, J. (2010). Speech-Language Pathologists’ Preparation, Practices, and Perspectives on Serving Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Children. Communication Disorders Quarterly, 33 (3), 169-180. DOI: 10.1177/1525740110384132

Peña, E. (2007). Lost in Translation: Methodological Considerations in Cross-Cultural Research. Child Development, 78 (4), 1255-1264. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01064.x

Thordardottir, E. (2010). Towards evidence-based practice in language intervention for bilingual children. Journal of Communication Disorders, 43 (6), 523-537. DOI: 10.1016/j.jcomdis.2010.06.001

Williams, C., & McLeod, S. (2012). Speech-language pathologists’ assessment and intervention practices with multilingual children. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 14 (3), 292-305. DOI: 10.3109/17549507.2011.636071


© MCF 2013

Next post: “Teaching” children. Saturday 23^rd February 2013.

Why not learn another language? How about Chinese? =Guest post=

by Irma Lachmund

We just need to spread the word a bit better about the joy and enrichment that language learning brings to our lives! My 12-year-old boy has been accepted into the Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) Academic Languages Program, at Mount Lawley Senior High School in Perth, Western Australia. School commenced in early February and Chinese is becoming the latest addition to the languages in our family.

My daughter has been a participant in this program in the past two years, going into year 10 now. She has the luck of being allowed to learn two languages since year 8. Tuition in German is part of the GATE program and she chose Italian as other language within the normal school curriculum. She is doing well and received highest marks for both languages, most likely assisted by the fact that we speak German at home despite living in Australia.

Since 2010, only one language can be selected by students in the GATE program and there is only a choice between Italian and Chinese. As my boy has been learning Italian in Primary School for seven years and, like his fellow students, still cannot say much more than his name, age and what he likes doing after school, he decided to learn Chinese. He is a bit unsure about this journey, especially since his sister told him that many students complain about how hard it is to learn Chinese.

I have been interested in the Chinese language since a short trip to Hong Kong and Guangzhou in 1985. I spent two weeks with a friend in Central. To overcome language barriers with cab drivers, and to make sure that I got home ok, I was taught to say in Cantonese: “Please drive me to Kennedy Road number 37, at number 31 please turn right”. I have never forgotten this sentence and practice it now and then with Cantonese speakers that I meet in my life. Not always successful I might say, as my pronunciation surely changed significantly in the past 25 years, with this experience becoming more and more faded. But at least it always gets me a laugh and helps me to connect with the people I meet.

German is my mother tongue. Plattdeutsch, or Low German, a dialect, was spoken in our house during my childhood. This dialect was considered inferior, so the children were never addressed in that language but talked to in standard German, the language used for writing. Sadly, the dialect is now lost in the village where I grew up. I learnt English from year 5 and French from year 7 at school, as learning two languages at high school was and still is a normal part of the school curriculum in Germany. After finishing high school, I added some Italian in evening classes, as I liked the Italian lifestyle and wanted to complement the words that I picked up while on holidays there. At university, after my law degree, I studied Indonesian and even worked as a junior lawyer for the German-Indonesian Chamber of Trade and Commerce (Perkumpulan Ekonomi Indonesia-Jerman) in the late eighties. But all these languages use the same script and work in a similar way. If a German speaker reads aloud an Indonesian text and pronounces each word as if it was written in German, an Indonesian speaker is able to understand what has been said.

My decision to join my boy in learning Mandarin came from the heart.  

The three language learners in my family.

Photo: Irma Lachmund

I intend to work along the same workbook and use additional sites on the internet to complement the written words. My friend Dr Mandy Scott from Canberra has been involved in the Association for Learning Mandarin in Australia. She visited us with her mother a little while ago and we had a chat about whether it is really that hard to learn Chinese. Apparently, the time to acquire comfortable language speaking levels for English speakers has been estimated. People agree that Mandarin is among the languages most difficult to learn.

But I believe that we have the advantage of already knowing and speaking more than one language. Also I understand that the grammar of Mandarin is simple. Biggest hurdle for me so far is the school’s learning focus on the acquisition of written Chinese. I am sure we’ll deal with that. When we keep up the conversation in our daily language learning practice, we should be all right. In addition, my daughter’s best friend is a native Chinese speaker and we could arrange special tuition from her, or join Chinese language courses at publicly funded adult learning institutions, such as TAFE, or any of the private businesses. Also, Bilingual Families Perth compiled a list of useful online resources for the Chinese language learner, that we are checking out at the moment.

We have a plan, and encouraging experiences are available from across the ocean. Multilingual Living, a network of multilingual people based in Seattle, ran the Language Challenge 101, where individuals and whole families committed to learning a new language over 101 days. They had many participants and video logs of their experiences are available on the website. My boy’s Chinese knowledge is progressing quickly; as for me, I am far behind, but I am on my way.

People are having fun learning another language, within their own setting and at their own pace.

Irma Lachmund is the chairperson and founder of Bilingual Families Perth, a not for profit network of families with more than one language in Western Australia. She also authors a blog. 

© Irma Lachmund 2011

Next post: Big multilinguals. Saturday 14^th May 2011.