Language dominance: A one-way street with oncoming traffic=Guest post=

by Brian A. Goldstein

“I live on a one-way street that’s also a dead end. I’m not sure how I got there.”

(Steven Wright)

At the recent 2012 convention of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, I attended many talks focusing on multilingual speakers. Overall, the presentations were of high quality, and I learned a great deal. I noticed, however, that many of the presenters mentioned, and sometimes measured, the children’s language “dominance.”

Yes, I purposely put that word in quotes. Although “dominance” is an intuitively pleasing word/notion, it is ultimately unsatisfying. I am not sure the word “dominant” is an appropriate one to use because, as a unit of measure, it neither describes nor explains. It puts us down a one-way road on which there is oncoming traffic and that is a road we don’t want to travel. To continue the metaphor, the oncoming traffic is the non-“dominant” language. That is, when we aim our headlights at the “dominant” language, then that is the only language that gets the attention. The “other” language ends up in our blind spot, and thus, we might focus only on the one language that is considered “dominant.” Such blinded attention serves to view the bilingual as two monolinguals in one, a notion against which Grosjean (e.g. 1989) has repeatedly, vigorously, and convincingly argued.

“Dominance” is suspect for a variety of reasons, some of which were addressed in this blog before. First, there is not a singular definition. It has been used to describe proficiency, age of acquisition, range of levels, functional strength, scores on standardized tests, etc. (Butler and Hakuta, 2006). Second, it is notoriously difficult to measure (Valdés and Figueroa, 1994). For example, to even attempt to measure it, Valdés and Figueroa indicate that the examiner must measure performance in each of the two languages across tasks, contexts, settings, modalities, and functions and then compare the individual’s total performance for each language. This set of tasks necessitates parallel and equivalent instruments in the two languages. Needless to say, few of these types of instruments exist. Finally, such tests of dominance have been criticized roundly for their relatively poor psychometric properties (e.g. MacSwan, 2005, see item 112 in the Contents; MacSwan and Rolstad, 2006; Mahoney and MacSwan, 2005). Example criticisms include:

• lack of a theoretical foundation
• weak validity and reliability
• lack of adequate operational definitions or norms
• use of arbitrary cut-off scores
• assuming “dominance” is stable over time
• poor classification rates

The result of such relatively poor psychometrics properties is an over-representation of bi-/multilinguals in special education programs, which renders these tests, “...at best arbitrary, at worst, dangerous” (Shuy 1978, p. 376).

These concerns provide the backdrop in terms of one of my apprehensions about language “dominance”. I am concerned that once, and if, “dominance” is determined, it will never be re-evaluated, especially for multilingual children who have communication disorders and are enrolled in intervention. That is, once the child is determined to be “dominant” in Language A, she will always be seen as “dominant” in Language A. Language B will not be merely the road less taken but will be the road never taken (my deepest apologies to Robert Frost). Children’s language skills change significantly over time, especially for multilingual children whose input and output vary based on a host of factors including age, community, parents, siblings, educational status, etc. (e.g. Rojas and Iglesias 2013).

Thus, “dominance,” even if it is psychologically responsible (Menn, 1992), is a moving target in the same way that one adjusts their driving based on the type of road, driving conditions, and make of car. We would be better off examining, and re-examining, multilingual children’s language use (i.e. how often they use each language) and language proficiency (i.e. how well they use each language). By better off, I mean examining constructs that are reliable and valid and aid us in understanding the variables that impinge on language acquisition in multilingual children. As Valdés and Figueroa (1994, pp. 66-67) said, “[m]easuring bilingual ability and bilingual proficiency is both complex and problematic...the best we can do is use a series of measures that together might provide guidance for describing an individual as more like or unlike other bilingual individuals...”

Furthermore, examining language skills in multilinguals needs to be specific to each language domain (i.e. phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, lexicon, and pragmatics). That is, an omnibus notion of “dominance” is equivocal at best and simply does not seem to be supported by the available evidence, at worst, as I have alluded to in a previous post. For example, Ball, Müller, and Munro (2001) examined the production of the trill /r/ in 44 Welsh-dominant and 39 English-dominant children aged 2;6-5;0. They found that production of the trill /r/ differed depending on language “dominance” (quotes mine). Welsh-dominant children acquired the trill earlier than English-dominant peers.

There are other studies that indicate that “dominance” is not a critical factor in accounting for language skills (phonological, in this case). Law and So (2006) examined 100 Cantonese- and Putonghua-speaking bilingual children, aged 2;6-4;11. The children were grouped as either “Cantonese dominant” or “Putonghua dominant” (again, quotes are mine). They found that irrespective of language dominance, Cantonese phonology was acquired earlier than Putonghua phonology. Such equivocal results indicate that labeling a child as “dominant in English” or “dominant in Amharic” simply does not seem warranted as it neither describes nor explains. Finally, Paradis (2001) examined syllable omissions in French-English bilingual 2-year-olds. In 4-syllable target words, English-dominant bilinguals preserved higher frequency of 2nd syllables than did French-dominant bilinguals, but French-dominant bilinguals preserved a higher frequency of 3rd syllables than did English-dominant bilinguals.

Going forward, the picture might even be more complicated than this. Take phonology, for example, a multilingual child could have a superior ability in producing long words in Language A compared to Language B but superior ability in producing complex syllables in Language B than in Language A. If that is the case, then in what language is the child “dominant?” The point is that even defining “dominance” is more complicated than it seems. What is seemingly intuitive is actually quite difficult and nuanced. I am suggesting that we need to examine the child’s skills across each domain in all of their languages and relate those outcomes to their language use and language proficiency. That way, regardless of the car you drive, you will not be traveling down a one-way street with oncoming traffic. Just remember:

“Understanding is a two-way street.”

(Eleanor Roosevelt)

 

Brian A. Goldstein is Dean of the School of Nursing and Health Sciences and Professor of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences at La Salle University, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

Ball, M., Müller, N., & Munro, S. (2001). The acquisition of the Rhotic Consonants by Welsh-English bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism, 5 (1), 71-86. DOI: 10.1177/13670069010050010401 

Grosjean F (1989). Neurolinguists, beware! The bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person. Brain and language, 36 (1), 3-15. PMID: 2465057

Law, N., & So, L. (2006). The relationship of phonological development and language dominance in bilingual Cantonese-Putonghua children. International Journal of Bilingualism, 10 (4), 405-427. DOI: 10.1177/13670069060100040201

MacSwan, J. (2005). The “Non-Non” crisis and academic bias in native language assessment of language minorities. In J. Cohen, K. McAlister, K. Rolstad, & J. MacSwan (Eds.), ISB4: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism (pp. 1415-1422). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. 

MACSWAN, J., & ROLSTAD, K. (2006). How Language Proficiency Tests Mislead Us About Ability: Implications for English Language Learner Placement in Special Education. Teachers College Record, 108 (11), 2304-2328. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9620.2006.00783.x

Mahoney, K., & MacSwan, J. (2005). Reexamining Identification and Reclassification of English Language Learners: A Critical Discussion of Select State Practices. Bilingual Research Journal, 29 (1), 31-42. DOI: 10.1080/15235882.2005.10162822

Menn, L. (1992). Building our own models: Child phonology comes of age. In C.A. Ferguson, L. Menn, & C. Stoel-Gammon (Eds.), Phonological development: Model, research, implications (pp. 3-15).Timonium, MD: York Press. 

Paradis, J. (2001). Do bilingual two-year-olds have separate phonological systems? International Journal of Bilingualism, 5 (1), 19-38. DOI: 10.1177/13670069010050010201

Rojas, R., & Iglesias, A. (2013). The Language Growth of Spanish-Speaking English Language Learners. Child Development, 84 (2), 630-646. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2012.01871.x

Shuy, R. (1978). Problems in assessing language ability in bilingual education programs. In H. La Fontaine et al. (eds.), Bilingual Education. (pp. 376-381). Wayne, NJ: Avery Publishing.

© Brian A. Goldstein 2013

Next post: Speech-language clinics: cultural meeting places? Saturday 9^th February 2013.

Speech and language

Generally speaking, speech concerns physical abilities, whereas language concerns cognitive abilities. Speech is what we say and hear, in actual linguistic interactions, language is what allows us to produce and perceive speech as mediating meaningful interactions. This is why speech bubbles are called speech bubbles and not language bubbles.

Image © Marian Sigler (Wikimedia Commons), adapted (MCF)

The medium of speech is sound, although language ability does not exhaust itself in sound-mediated languages: sign languages are a case in point, making it clear that speech and language are independent abilities.

Both speech and language feature in the job description of clinicians dealing with spoken means of expression. We can produce and perceive what sounds like intact speech but might not be cognitively processed as meaningful interaction, as John Cleese demonstrates in a lecture about the human brain; and we can have intact language abilities without being able to produce intact speech, as when we stammer or stutter: Cleese’s Monty Python co-star Michael Palin explains what led him to create the Michael Palin Centre for Stammering Children.

Stammering and stuttering are a source of concern among parents of multilingual children, judging by the amount of queries I receive on this topic. The usual question is whether multilingualism can “cause” these disfluencies. The answer is that it cannot, because multilingualism is a matter of language, not speech – and because multilingualism does not “cause” any problems of any kind (I’ll have more to say about “causes”, scare quotes included, in a coming post). Stuttering and/or stammering are well-attested consequences of something else, small children’s newfound abilities to string words together by means of grammatical constructions, and newfound eagerness to say everything they want to say at the same time, as I noted before. This is why children may stutter/stammer in one of their languages, but not in the others, and these are developmental rather than pathological issues, which sort themselves out in time.

Other features of child speech may have similar or different explanations. Having “trouble with ‘r’ sounds” (another common question I get) can also be developmental. These speech sounds are among the last ones that children acquire, because their production involves quite sophisticated control of articulators and airstream. Many of us have trouble with ‘r’ sounds throughout life, in early or later languages: just do a web search on e.g. “rolled r”, or “learn to trill”, or “pronouncing r”, to see what I mean.

In contrast, “not pronouncing the letter ‘s’ at the end of words”, as one parent once wrote, may be worth investigating further. Sounds represented by ‘s’ are also a typically late acquisition, and avoiding their troublesome articulation by omission is then a developmental speech issue. However, depending on factors such as the child’s age, or linguistic environment, absence of ‘s’ sounds at the end of words may point to a grammar issue, and so to a language issue: in several languages, including English, word-final ‘s’ sounds represent grammatical noun plurals or person/number verbal inflections, of which the child may not be developing cognitive command, as in, for example, SLI (Specific Language Impairment). My Ask-a-Linguist FAQ ‘Child language acquisition’ gives a brief overview of typical language development, meant to help caregivers make informed decisions about whether and when to worry about children’s speech and language development.

Language ability can be gauged through speech – though not exclusively. A bit like driving ability can be gauged by the way you drive a car, though not exclusively. Analysis of speech samples collected from clients is one of the many ways through which speech-language clinicians acquaint themselves with their clients’ abilities, in order to decide whether and how clinical intervention is required for speech, for language, or both. The ASHA site has more information on speech and language in clinical settings. And Charles Sturt University has just launched an online resource dedicated to Multilingual Children’s Speech. It includes a downloadable Position Paper, created by the International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech, of which I am a proud invited member.

The next post will have something to say about a well-known cause (no scare quotes) of our speech-language abilities: the ways we’ve learnt to adopt and shed cultural traits which characterise our different environments.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Roots and wings. Saturday 22^nd December 2012.

Language therapy or language tuition?

The titles Speech-language Therapist and Language Tutor name different job descriptions, different qualifications and, therefore, different professional competencies: speech-language therapists (or speech-language pathologists, in alternative terminology) do therapy, language tutors do tuition.

In practice, however, the distinct services that these professionals provide are sometimes not so distinct. One reason might be the resilient confusion between two meanings of the word language, in English and other languages. Both job descriptions include this word, although language therapists (let’s call them so) deal with overall language ability, whereas language tutors deal with specific languages. Another reason stems from both specialists being called upon to intervene in a child’s life because there is a problem, or a suspected problem: language therapy addresses problems which affect all of the child’s languages (e.g. language delay), whereas language tuition solves problems with specific languages (e.g. everyday or specialised exposure) which bear no relation to the child’s other languages.

Interestingly, the merger of professional competencies works one-way only: you probably wouldn’t dream of entrusting your child’s possible language disability to a qualified language tutor, whereas you do expect qualified language therapists to address deficiencies in particular languages. I’ve had reports of therapy-for-tuition services of this kind from a number of countries in Africa and Asia, although I doubt that they are restricted to these parts of the world. I would be very interested to know whether the same situation holds elsewhere.

Let me try to work out why this situation arises at all. Children naturally acquire the language uses around them, from elders and/or peers. These uses may not match what parents or schoolteachers deem to be desirable ones, where “desirable” means ‘standard’. In matters of language, the word “standard”, in turn, means ‘good’, whereby non-standard uses of language are ‘bad’, that is, in need of remediation. By the same reasoning which recommends clinical assistance for bad health, cure for bad language should also be sought from a qualified clinician.

I mean the word cure quite literally. An increasing number of typical child language features have also come to merge with features of disordered development, drawing on current standards of normality which are as usable, in practice, as current standards of physical beauty. Almost 70 years ago, in her Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy depicting life in the English countryside in the 1880’s, Flora Thompson saw it coming :

“The general health of the hamlet was excellent. The healthy, open-air life and the abundance of coarse but wholesome food must have been largely responsible for that; but lack of imagination may also have played a part. Such people at that time did not look for or expect illness, and there were not as many patent medicine advertisements then as now to teach them to search for symptoms of minor ailments in themselves.”

Any label which remotely hints at clinical disruption, tagged on to a child, will drive zealous caregivers to appeal to those whose job descriptions likewise include clinical labels.

Zealous teachers stand for the lion’s share of such moves, despite cautionary reports exemplified by Jeff MacSwan and Kellie Rolstad’s ‘How language proficiency tests mislead us about ability: implications for English language learner placement in special education’. The article reviews evidence that the bulk of referrals of young language learners to special education, in the US, has nothing to do with the learners, and all to do with assessment policies and poorly designed language tests. This is the case elsewhere around the world, as also reported in my book Multilingual Norms.

Misguided referrals of this kind count as false positives, where typical multilingual behaviour is mistaken for language disorder. In time, cumulative practices “identifying” multilinguals as disordered become standard practices, in yet another interesting meaning of the word “standard”: as Brian Goldstein quotes in a previous post: “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” Accepted habits boost reluctance to revise mindsets and practices, with two consequences: overworked language therapists, squandering time and resources tuned to atypicality on typically developing children; and blindness to false negatives, which mistake disorder for typical multilingual behaviour and thus fail to identify disordered multilingualism.

A third consequence, perhaps the direst of all, is the stigma which sticks to the children who get singled out by means of special labels. Not just because “special” is Correct-Speak for ‘not-quite-up-to-par’, but principally because labels go on deciding our opportunities for us.

Next time, I’ll deal with the bit that I missed, in this post, in the label speech-language therapist.


© MCF 2012

Next post: Speech and language. Wednesday 12^th December 2012.

Providing clinical services to bilingual children: Stop Doing That!=Guest post=

by Brian A. Goldstein

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” (Thomas Paine)

In most countries, bilingualism is well-established. That is not the case in the United States. However, because of demographic changes, bilingualism in the United States is slowly but surely becoming the default condition… the underlying representation… the new normal (Goldstein, 2012). In the U.S., it is estimated that 10.9 million (21%) 5- to 17-year-olds speak a language other than English at home, and 2.7 million (5%) speak English with difficulty (Language Use, U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2007). At the same time, the amount of research related to bilingual children has increased significantly. Much of that research is translational in that it aids practitioners in providing reliable and valid clinical services to bilingual children.

Despite the rapid increase in research related to bilinguals, clinical practice has not always changed as a necessary and important by-product of that research (Kritikos, 2003). I witnessed this disconnect recently while attending the annual convention of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), in November this year. At the convention, I witnessed clinicians questioning clinical advice that has been current for 20 years. It was clear to me that these individuals did not seem to have received these messages. Here are some messages that I believe need to be delivered.

• Stop telling bilingual parents to speak only one language to their children. There is no evidence that speaking only one language or practicing the one parent-one language dichotomy improves language skills or staves off a speech and language disorder. Even parents who report that they use the one parent-one language rule do not do so in practice (Lanza 2004).

• Stop believing that being bilingual causes and/or exacerbates a speech or language disorder. As Kohnert says, “A disorder in bilinguals is not caused by bilingualism or cured by monolingualism” (Kohnert, 2007, p. 105). It is now reasonable to conclude that in the acquisition of two languages, bilingual children do not appear to be “remarkably delayed nor remarkably advanced” relative to monolingual children (Nicoladis and Genesee, 1997, p. 264).

• Stop using family members as interpreters/translators (Langdon and Cheng, 2002). Family members are not trained in this area and are clearly biased when it comes to their own family members. It also places them in a precarious position in which they are not likely to be comfortable.

• Stop trying to calculate an omnibus measure of language dominance. The notion of dominance has been criticized on both theoretical and methodological grounds (e.g., MacSwan and Rolstad, 2006). Moreover, its utility relative to speech and language skills is equivocal. Ball, Müller, and Munro (2001) found that Welsh-dominant children (aged 2;6-5;0) acquired the Welsh trill earlier than their peers who were English-dominant. However, Law and So (2006) found that both Cantonese-dominant and Putonghua-dominant children (2;6-4;11) acquired Cantonese phonology first. This is not to say that variables such as language history, language use, and language proficiency are not important variables to consider. They are. What should be dismissed, however, is determining language dominance based on a standardized test and then triaging clinical services based on its results.

• Stop assessing speech and language skills in only one language. The bilingual’s languages are not mirror images of each other. Skills are often distributed across the two languages. The same language skills can be easy in one language but difficult in the other (Peña, Bedore, and Rappazzo, 2003). The distributed nature of language skills in bilinguals necessitates examining speech and language skills in each of the child’s languages.

• Stop waiting 2-3 years before assessing a bilingual child for a possible speech and language disorder. The belief by many practitioners is that a child needs to have years of experience in the second language before even thinking about assessing their speech and language skills bilingually. That viewpoint runs counter to the mounting evidence that such children acquire their language skills fairly quickly. For example, Paradis (2007) found that after 21 months of exposure to English, sequential bilinguals exhibited skills within the normal range of monolinguals in the areas of morphology (40%), receptive vocabulary (65%), and story grammar (90%). In a seminar titled English Phonological Skills of English Language Learners, presented at the ASHA convention in New Orleans in November 2009, Gilhool, Goldstein, Burrows, and Paradis found that after an average of 8 months of exposure to English, sequential bilinguals (ages 4;6-6;9) averaged consonant accuracy of 90%.

• Stop comparing the speech and language skills of bilinguals to those of monolinguals. Bilinguals are not two monolinguals in one (Grosjean, 1989). Thus, although their skills will be similar to monolinguals, they will not be identical. Further, in a seminar titled Lifelong Bilingualism: Linguistic Costs, Cognitive Benefits, and Long-Term Consequences, presented at the ASHA convention in Philadelphia in November 2010, Bialystok indicated that both languages of bilinguals are active when using one of them, even in strongly monolingual contexts. What this means is that bilinguals do not sublimate the other language, even if the speaking community is exclusively or largely monolingual. Both languages are always active to one degree or another. Thus, from a clinical perspective, this view argues for comparing monolinguals to monolinguals and bilinguals to bilinguals.

• Stop treating those with speech or language disorders in only one language. To again quote Kohnert (2007, pp. 143-144), “Being ‘monolingual’ in a bilingual family or community exacerbates a weakness, turning a disability into a handicap.” If, as practitioners, our focus is to develop a bilingual speaker, then services for those with speech and language disorders necessarily have to be conducted in both languages. Intervention in only one language is not an option.

Finally, “Stop thinking in terms of limitations and start thinking in terms of possibilities.” (Terry Josephson)

Brian A. Goldstein is Dean of the School of Nursing and Health Sciences and Professor of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences at La Salle University, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

© Brian A. Goldstein 2011

Next post: Language geniuses and language dunces. Wednesday 14^th December 2011.

People see, people do

Creativity seems to be a defining characteristic of human beings. If we human beings weren’t creative, the reasoning goes, we wouldn’t have made it to where we are now (whatever that means) – and we wouldn’t, of course, be able to extol creativity as the path to getting there (ditto).

Our languages serve our creativity. In Western parts of the world, we learned this in 1836, when the German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt published his book Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues (translated into English as On Language), and remarked that language “makes infinite use of finite means”.

Humboldt meant that we can do with our languages whatever we need to do to make them work for us. The way we learn to do this, however, doesn’t seem to be all that creative.

Photo: MCF

Children do not only end up using their languages the way somebody else does, whether at home or in school: their language learning is deemed successful only when they actually do so. I’m not arguing that we learn our languages through simple imitation: my work on child language makes clear my views on this. I’m saying that like the proverbial apple and its tree, linguistic ripeness seeds its own orchard.

I can give one example, from Singapore. Little Singaporeans are known to say things like the following, where I transcribe in ordinary spelling what is heard:  

          I miss a class this morning. 

         That happen a long time ago.

Why do little Singaporeans say this? Because that’s what they hear big Singaporeans say. I’m talking about Singapore English here, by which I mean the standard version of the language that is used in the country, not Singlish. These uses of verbs have been ascribed to ignorance of past tense forms, or to other ignorance subsumed under general labels like “incomplete learning” of the “correct” forms. For both little and big ones, by the way.

Now, because I’ve lived in Singapore for many years, because I’ve listened to a lot of Singapore English, and because I found it odd that a whole country should go around speaking incomplete English, I decided to check matters out. Instead of the grammatical deficiency with which Singaporean speakers were diagnosed, my study, Past tense suffixes and other final plosives in Singapore English, found a phonological issue, one that is besides shared by other speakers of English throughout the world: the well-known instability of [t] and [d] at the end of syllables.

In Singapore English, present tense trust and bend can sound like ‘truss’ and ‘Ben’, both present tense send and past tense sent like [sen], and past tenses left and went like [lef] and [wen]. A Singaporean’s best friend, with no verbs involved, is as much a [bes fren] as the [-st] of missed is [-s] and the [-nd] of happened is [-n]. In other Englishes, the next world is also the neck’s whirl, the past is pass, and facts are fax. Singapore English is just/juss one more example of this. You can listen to the corpus of speech data on which I based my study.

The issue is this: if children fail to conform to the linguistic models that are available around them, they also fail to acquire linguistic appropriateness to their daily environments. But if they do conform to models that for some reason are not deemed acceptable, then they, and whoever seeded those models for them, risk their reputation as appropriate users of language. Similar issues of serving as you have it served arise, for example, among self-labelled OPOL families. There was a time when researchers puzzled over “OPOL” children’s mixing of their languages. The puzzlement vanished when the presumed OL-users, who already were or had by then become multilingual, were found to do likewise, despite reporting in good faith that they didn’t.

What we say and what we think we say can be two quite different kinds of language. Those of us who doubt this might want to pursue some very entertaining fieldwork, listening to what we actually produce, speech-wise. We often (mis)take ourselves for users of desirable, standard conventions, which is fine: self-flattery is another defining characteristic of human beings. The problems begin when we take non-standard uses of language, whose label reflects factual observations, for sub-standard uses, a label that reflects opinion. From there to “wrong”, and so in need of correction, takes but a small step.

Standard uses are also the ones contemplated in assessment instruments. A child’s linguistic input, from elders as well as peers, is accordingly part of routine observation, in speech-language clinics. Taking into account a child’s natural way of copying uses of language is a necessary step to deciding between difference and disorder. Sharynne McLeod discusses similar issues in her blog Speaking my Languages.

I’ve now returned several times to matters of assessment, in this blog, and to the kind of knowledge that allows us to trust both our assessment instruments and our judgement when using them. Next time, I’ll deal with a rather broad issue about knowledge itself. Namely, how do we get to know what we know? Or perhaps I should say: how do we get to know what we think that we know.

© MCF 2011

Next post: How do we know? Saturday 25^th June 2011. 

The fight for a fair deal

We spend a lot of our time and energy assessing, ourselves and others. We look and re-look in the mirror for the perfect fit to the image we wish to project. We slot objects, people and attitudes into the mental rating boxes that guide our opinions, and we sometimes do this at first sight. Less benign emotions than love can take root in this way too.

Assessment experts, among them teachers, medical doctors and other clinicians, rely on professional rating boxes. Whether lay or specialist, our expectations appear to carry a surprisingly significant weight in how we gather information. Surprisingly, because they’re often based on nothing more substantial than hearsay; and significant, because they mean that we already know the answers to the questions that we nevertheless keep asking: we need not look any further.

I can give one example. I was once taking my regular walk in a nature reserve, in Singapore, where I live, and I heard a group of tourists heatedly debating whether they would be lucky enough to see a crocodile. One of them had read it somewhere that crocodiles are a common sight in Southeast Asian cities. A glimpse of an unmistakably reptile tail, which suddenly scrambled away from us, made his day: “There it is! I just saw one!!” What this visitor actually saw was a (large) monitor lizard. I took a picture of his (her?) friend, or perhaps of her-/himself, on another occasion. 

A (rare) specimen of Crocodillus Singaporeanus.
Photo: MCF

But he (the visitor, not the lizard) will swear he never, ever, laid eyes on a monitor lizard, because he “knew” that crocodiles might be around, not lizards. He will tell all his friends that he saw a crocodile in Singapore, who will tell all their friends, who will then all “know” that there are crocodiles in Singapore. Their source is the indisputable affidavit of an eyewitness.

On a rather more serious level, the way in which expectations affect observations was studied in a school, in the late 1960’s. The findings became known as the Rosenthal Effect. Like the children in this school, multilinguals get labelled before observation, and are therefore expected to be the special case, as mentioned earlier. One common expectation, for example, is that being multilingual is a self-explanatory “diagnosis”. Expectations, incidentally, are also what lies behind national and other stereotypes. If you “know” that an X will provide evidence of W properties, you’ll both see W and disregard all evidence of non-W. The same effect can explain, for example, successful therapies with placebos. And superstition.

Multilinguals, their caregivers, school teachers and speech-language therapists are all in the same boat. Awareness of multilingual behaviour is not required for teaching or clinical certification, even of multilinguals, and language assessment tools are standardised for monolingual users. All too often, teachers and clinicians thus have no reliable tools to guide their assessments. Adapting or translating tests works only partially and often badly, for the reasons we saw before: each language is unique. If dismissing adaptation and translation as a handy solution sounds far-fetched, have a look at what is involved in the mammoth task of making speech-language assessment usable, in this ASHA Directory (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association).

To top it all, there are speech-language assessment instruments for only a tiny fraction of the world’s languages, which of course raises problems for the assessment of monolingual children too. For multilinguals, yet another issue arises, paradoxically, where assessment instruments do exist for one of their languages. This is usually the mainstream language, which may not coincide with the “main” language of a multilingual. On the (monolingual-based) assumption that testing one language is enough to assess the overall linguistic ability of a multilingual, two things can happen. First, that underachievement in that one language may lead to suspicion of language delay. Children may be referred to further therapy, when what they would need is a language tutor. Second, that monolingual assessment naturally misses features of typical mixing, whose regular patterns in fact aid in the diagnosis of language disorder among multilingual children.

Other typical characteristics of multilinguals may go undetected, or pass as atypical. We don’t just mix languages, but also gestures, posture, attitude. A speech-language assessment, despite its name, crucially involves observation of body language, including body and eye contact. The absence (or presence) of standard signals of this kind may be culture-bound. For example, falling silent with a lowered gaze may be interpreted in some cultures as the absence of a response, whereas in others it is the presence of a mark of respect.

The problem is not so much that children (and the rest of us) are not usually socialised in speech-language clinics. The problem is that clinics and clinical tools belong to specific cultures too. What, many of us may wonder, can be a more striking image of childhood well-being than cuddling a teddy-bear? Many of us may indeed wonder, but not all. Perhaps not even most of us. Some of us may wonder instead why someone would want a child to engage in close bodily contact with a miniature representation of a beast of prey. 

Cuddly toys are part of the extensive array of clinical aids routinely used to elicit linguistic and other behaviour from children. One common test involves having several toys made available to a child, and then ask the child to grab, in turn, the ones named by the clinician. Children may fail this apparently straightforward test of vocabulary and object recognition, not because of a language problem, but because their culture forbids them to touch objects that do not belong to them. The child wouldn’t have either the sophisticated social and linguistic awareness that is needed to explain, preferably politely, this “non-compliant” behaviour to an adult. Perhaps the child’s culture doesn’t allow children to address adults, or question their demands. Or perhaps the culture does allow this, but not in the language that the child happens to share with the clinician. If you’re interested in research, reviews and reports on these issues, have a look in my recent collection, Multilingual Norms.

School teachers and school kids don’t have it much easier, whether in monolingual or multilingual settings. The language tests that they have to set and sit may also misrepresent their own uses. Here’s one example, taken from a real-life paper in a real-life English school subject:

And here’s one suggestion for you: a) First, answer according to your own use of English, without thinking much – the more one thinks about language uses, especially when they come robed in correctness, the worse it gets, I find; b) Then ask friends, relatives, schoolchildren, teachers of English, to answer too, in the same way; c) Then compare your results; d) Then come back to us on this blog with what you found out.

I won’t tell you (yet) what the test creator took as the right answer. I’ll do it in a comment to this post a few days after publishing it. Your little survey will provide you with a database of actual uses of English, for this particular example, that we can also discuss here. On a suitably large scale and with suitable statistical treatment, this is how norms of usage are established.

To round up my thoughts for today: the neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote, in his 1986 book The man who mistook his wife for a hat, that “Our tests, our approaches [...] our ‘evaluations’, are ridiculously inadequate. They only show us deficits, they do not show us powers.” Granted, he was talking about severely disordered patients, but my point is that we all come out as more or less severely disordered if there are no means of assessing our “normality”. Sacks’ plea concerned a woman with severe mental decomposition, who nevertheless found ways to integrate her world with nature and music, for example. Engaging with nature and music was not part of standard neurological assessment tools.

This is why I mean the word fight in the title of this post quite literally. We may lack the tools that do justice to whoever we’re assessing, but we must at least realise that we do lack them. If we insist on fitting everyone’s feet into Cinderella slippers (another cultural stereotype, I know), which were fashioned for Cinderella’s feet, there is no way we can provide ourselves with the means to offer a fair deal in assessment: we’ll keep finding Ugly Sisters. Or crocodiles.

I have one last thing to say, a confession to make. You may have noticed that I had some difficulty trimming all that I wanted to say about assessment, particularly child assessment, into a post of reasonable dimensions. I had tremendous difficulty. This is an issue that lies very, very close to my heart, but I also know that no one has time to read blogs that just go on scrolling down and down forever. I will come back to these matters. Standardisation, not of tests but of the languages that are used in tests, is in line next but, until then, I hope you will let me know of your own concerns about assessment of multilinguals, here or privately. We need to learn from one another. I also meant quite literally what I said in my welcome message: this blog is for you.

© MCF 2010

Next post: Code makers and code breakers. Saturday 6^th November 2010.