Language learners and linguistic resourcefulness

Learning new languages can be a source of unexpected pleasure. I don’t just mean the perhaps more familiar prospects that making sense of the languages will make sense of people and cultures that up to then had struck us as ‘odd’, or allow us to acquire, first-hand, knowledge and wisdom that we had no idea existed because we had no idea how to access the code that gives them voice. I also mean making sense of the languages as objects of discovery themselves, which goes well beyond the utilitarian purposes we’re commonly told we should learn languages for.

I mean the fun of cracking, bit by bit, on our own, the puzzles that languages are, as when we start asking ourselves questions like Can we say things this way? or How come there are words for this? Eventually, such ‘this’ questions lead to their ‘that’ counterparts – How about that way? Can there be words for that, too? Asking ‘that’ questions means that we’re ready to take ownership of our new languages, prompting us to attempt to answer these questions ourselves.

Exploring possibilities in this way is what learning is all about. Children do it – which may well explain why they are said to be expert language learners. Encouraging similar exploration among older learners, including of the mistakes that inevitably follow and that provide evidence of learning, would thus appear to assist language learning. H. G. Widdowson thought so, when he argued that “proficiency only comes with nonconformity” in The ownership of English, and so did Guy Cook in Language Play, Language Learning.

Yet learners’ attempts at putting their linguistic resourcefulness to good use in their learning are deemed inappropriate, as Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa discuss in Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Curtailing learner inventiveness in judgemental terms draws on two paradoxes. First, the framing of learners’ “linguistic practices as deficient regardless of how closely they follow supposed rules of appropriateness”, in Flores and Rosa’s words, that is, of how closely they follow ‘native speaker’ standards. And second, the predication of creativity on multilingualism while condemning multilingual creativity for not being monolingual.

We seem to want to find fault with features of language because finding fault with features of language users is not politically correct, as a previous post makes clear. Or not traditionally correct: a recent discussion at ResearchGate, on How advanced must L2 speakers be before native speakers accept their neologisms as acceptable rather than inaccurate?, highlights the focus of traditional language teaching on the languages and their mythical homogeneity, rather than on the learners. We keep confusing languages with textbook samples of them, on the conviction that what matters for language teaching and learning isn’t what matters to the learners, here and now, but what mattered to textbook creators, there and then.

Wanting to be taught language that matters to us, wondering about ‘this’ and ‘that’ questions in our new languages, and wanting to be allowed to find answers to them are signs of linguistic competence. Nancy Bell and Anne Pomerantz have researched these issues for the past two decades, pointing out the fictional nature of traditional language learning materials and encouraging the expansion of learner repertoires through active engagement with the languages. In their new book, Humor in the Classroom. A Guide for Language Teachers and Educational Researchers, they argue that understanding and producing language play is a good indicator of proficiency, too. They reject the contention that “humor and play have no place in the serious business of scholarship, let alone language education”, by revisiting misconceptions about “unconventional talk, particularly as they relate to how we understand language use, language learning, and language teaching in educational spaces.”

Addressing language learners’ linguistic resourcefulness in teaching materials, teaching methods and classroom practices might mean unlearning the modes and contents of what we’ve come to expect of traditional language teaching, for both instructors and learners. But I suspect there may well be unexpected sources of teaching and learning pleasure in starting to ask ‘that’ questions about our current language teaching philosophies, and looking for answers to them.

Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education. Harvard Educational Review, 85 (2), 149-171. DOI: 10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149

Widdowson, H. (1994). The Ownership of English. TESOL Quarterly, 28 (2). DOI: 10.2307/3587438

© MCF 2016

This will be my last regular post on this blog.

There are 160 posts for you to enjoy, on the blog’s core topics of

myths and misconceptions about being multilingual
in the home, in school and in clinic.

Thank you for your reader support so far!

Nature, nurture, and linguistic giftedness

I met a Scandinavian couple the other day, who had visited Portugal countless times. They waxed lyrical about the country, its beauty, its history, its food, its people (I can, by the way, impartially confirm that their comments were spot on), and told me they would be moving there soon. Paperwork, housing and banking matters were all good to go, and they were delighted to have found a native who could answer their less bureaucratic questions.

“So when will you start learning Portuguese?”, I asked in turn. “Oh, no need for that!”, they waved me aside, “Everyone speaks English there”. They do?, I thought, wondering what everyone and English might mean, whenever anyone says what they’d just said. Okay, I went on thinking, so they’re aiming to make a home of Portugal’s beauty, history, food, and people in a language that is neither theirs nor the country’s. How will that work itself out?, I wanted to ask next but, before I could, they added: “Besides, we’re not good at languages.”

I must have mumbled something in response, and we probably went on talking about the marvels, the enrichment, etc. etc., afforded by travelling the world. I can’t remember. I’ve learned to switch to sociable autopilot after that line, one that I’ve heard countless times and as infinitely tried to counter, to null effect. The cumulative facts that I use more than the magical number of just two languages in my daily life and that I ‘work with languages’ apparently make me unsuitable to speak for the learning of new ones. “You’re gifted for languages”, people nod knowledgeably at me and, as far as they’re concerned, this compliment ends the argument.

Gift-wrapped language skills?

Image © Clipart Panda

The issue is, of course, that this is no compliment at all. It makes light of the tremendous amount of time, will, engagement, openness to input, readiness for practice that goes into learning any language, any time, whether we’re big or small. It tells me and other language learners that we’ve learned our languages because we were, literally, given something that we didn’t need to have merited to earn. It tells me and other believers in hard work that we should believe instead in easy handouts that we can’t help being awarded – or not awarded: the corollary of gift theories of learning is that some of us “are not good” at learning certain things, and can’t help it either. 

The issue is also that the gifted-for-languages reasoning is flawed. It says that in order to be able to learn languages we must be good at languages. So are we all gifted, since all of us are good at learning at least one language, or does linguistic giftedness apply only to multilinguals? In that case, the gift can only reveal itself after we’ve learned a couple of languages, since nobody is born using them. So was there a gift to start off with, or did we acquire language learning skills on the job? Are we talking nature or nurture?

Understand me right: I’m not denying giftedness. I’m saying that arguing that you can only learn to use new languages if you’re gifted for languages makes as much sense as arguing that you can only learn to use new smartphones if you’re gifted for smartphones. I can’t deny giftedness because the single most important thing I’ve learned from my 40+ years as a teacher is that we’re all gifted. The trick is to find where that gift lies, which is not necessarily where entitled education policy-makers keep telling us where to look. In order to be good at what we do, what we need to be given is the chance to develop what we’ve got. Francis Bacon dixit, in Novum Organon, 1: CXXI: “So again the seeds of things are of much latent virtue, and yet of no use except in their development”. Or, as Edward M. Hundert puts it in the last paragraph of his book Lessons from an Optical Illusion. On Nature and Nurture, Knowledge and Values, we must strive to “nurture that nature that has nurtured us”.

Let me leave you with two other nuggets of wisdom about learners and learning: Aristotle’s “Consuetudo est altera natura” (‘Habit is second nature’) and Quintilian’s “Consuetudo certissima est loquendi magistra” (‘Usage is the best language teacher’). Consuetudo is where we find the gift.

I’m sure that my new friends will enjoy living in Portugal – their way, with expat English among English-speaking Portuguese. They won’t notice, and I won’t tell them, what they’ll miss about Portugal’s consuetudines. Or about exploring unsuspected language learning skills, more on which next time.

© MCF 2016

Next post: Language learners and linguistic resourcefulness. Saturday 17^th September 2016.

Switching languages, mixing languages – or using languages?

Many years ago, I went, as usual, to fetch my children from Swedish Supply School, which met once a week after regular (English-medium) school in Singapore, where our family lived. On that particular occasion, one of the children was especially eager to start telling me all about her day. She spoke Portuguese, this being the language that the children and I have always shared, and she speckled it with so much English and Swedish that I felt compelled to interrupt her. “Querida!”, I giggled, “Que língua é que estás a falar?!” (‘Sweetheart! Which language are you speaking?!’). She stared at me briefly as if I were a clueless alien and then snapped, in squeaky clean Portuguese: “Uma qualquer, para dizer o que eu quero!” (‘Whichever, to say what I want to say!’).

What was I doing, here? I was giving evidence that being multilingual, as I am, hadn’t immunised me against the persuasion that languages are objects of reverence: they are there to be respected. Which meant that I was paying attention to my girl’s languages, not to her.

What was she doing? She was giving evidence that being multilingual, as she is, had made it clear to her that languages are tools: they are there to serve our needs. She had last used Portuguese in the early morning, a long time before the end of her working day, which had taken place first in English and then in Swedish. So why not use, in “whichever” language, the bits and pieces of the other language(s) in which those bits and pieces first became meaningful to her? All of my children did this, as I discuss in Chapter 10 of my book Three is a Crowd?. I found it particularly revealing that later, when they and I talked about these episodes, it was their turn to giggle when reporting their unawareness that they had been ‘mixing languages’, as this behaviour is usually called. Besides, as my girl then added about this episode, she knew that I knew all three languages in question, so “there was no problem there, right?”

Again, she left me without arguments. It may be true that only multilinguals in my children’s three languages might understand what they were saying when they used their languages in this way, but any multilingual in any languages would understand what they were doing: they were being typical multilinguals. The question then arises of why we came to talk about a feature of typical multilingualism as ‘mixing’, a word with rather negative undertones. Conversely, we might also ask what it means to not mix, or switch, languages or codes. Multilingual mixes usually raise judgemental or worried eyebrows as providing evidence of bad or impaired use of language, respectively. But “bad/impaired use of language” in fact means ‘bad/impaired use of a language’, and there is a world of difference between language and a language. So why don’t monolingual mixes cause generalised unease, and where do we draw the line?

The issue is precisely one of lines. Like country boundaries, language boundaries are figments of our collective imagination. Not even linguists have any idea what or where they might be. So why do we go on interpreting multilingual mixes as offending language boundaries? Ofelia García, in an interview conducted by François Grosjean on his blog Life as a Bilingual and titled What is Translanguaging?, answers this question pithily:

“Linguists often refer to the behavior of bilinguals when they go across these named language categories as code-switching. It is an external view of language. But translanguaging takes the internal perspective of speakers whose own mental grammar has been developed in social interaction with others. […] Translanguaging is more than going across languages; it is going beyond named languages and taking the internal view of the speaker’s language use.”

The book that Ofelia García edited with Li Wei, Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education, has more on how translanguaging characterises everyday multilingual practices.

Languages are there to be used as the tools that they are, not replicated as straitjacketed instruction manuals. Different languages make sense to us precisely because they allow us to engage with what matters to us in different ways, and to give the right flavour to what we wish to say. To use one of my favourite analogies, how we deal with our languages is no different from how we deal with our food. There are (standard) recipes, that we haven’t been called upon to put together because they were devised and tried by other people; there are ingredients, and tips about method and seasonings. But then we do it our way, because we are the ones doing the cooking. Favouring observation of each of the languages of multilinguals over what the multilinguals themselves do with them is like analysing recipes to find out how they taste. Multilinguals only transgress those rules that never took multilinguals themselves into account.

The next post, a guest post, keeps to the topic of creativity, this time about how and why we find ways of preserving our languages in printed form.

© MCF 2016

Next post: =Guest post= Being multiscriptal: why our alphabets matter, by Tim Brookes. Saturday 9^th July 2016.

Multilinguals and creativity

Multilingualism is generally assumed to entail creativity. This raises the very interesting issue of whether becoming multilingual makes us become creative, and suggests the even more interesting conclusion that most of the world’s population, being multilingual, must also be creative.

At the same time, since I find it quite difficult to discern the effects of so much global creativity on the continued design and implementation of, say, our global economic, political or educational systems, a closer inspection of what we actually know (as opposed to believe) about this might be in order. A sample of studies from the past decade shows mixed (un)certainty about correlating multilingualism with creativity, let alone asserting that multilingualism causes (or enhances, favours, develops, etc.) creativity, as follows.

Olusola O. Adesope and colleagues assessed findings from previous research in A systematic review and meta-analysis of the cognitive correlates of bilingualism, and concluded for positive correlations between multilingualism and increased cognitive outcomes on, for example, memory, attention and abstract skills. Bernhard Hommel and colleagues, in Bilingualism and creativity: Benefits in convergent thinking come with losses in divergent thinking, compared the creative performance of low-proficient and high-proficient bilinguals, finding that “bilingualism should not be related to ‘creativity’ as a unitary concept but, rather, to the specific processes and mechanisms that underlie creativity”. Hangeun Lee and Kyung Hee Kim, in Can speaking more languages enhance your creativity? likewise examined the relationship between creativity and “degree of bilingualism”, taken to reflect “multicultural experiences”, to find that “degree of bilingualism and creativity are positively correlated”. Mark Leikin, in The effect of bilingualism on creativity, reported that “both early bilingualism and some form of bilingual education” appear to affect (non)mathematical creativity, concluding that there are “differences between two types of creative ability in the context of bilingual and monolingual development.” Anatoliy Kharkhurin’s study, Bilingual verbal and nonverbal creative behavior, in turn, offered evidence to dampen any blanket statement that multilingualism necessarily implies creativity.

It becomes obvious from the research literature that there simply are too many variables at stake, whether linguistic, cognitive, cultural, educational, and so on, to allow clear-cut isolation of multilingualism as a factor of creativity. These variables, however, aren’t inherent to multilingualism: they have absolutely *nothing* to do with its purported ‘complexity’, and all to do with our choices to study them in relation to multilingualism. As much complexity, of the exact same kinds, would emerge if we ever decided to compare creativity among low-proficient vs. high-proficient monolinguals, for example, or among degrees of monolingualism. 

But we don’t do this. Why we don’t study monolingualism in the same way that we study multilingualism only proves our assumption that monolingualism is ‘simple’. It doesn’t prove that monolingualism is simple. This assumption is ideological, not empirical, as Li Wei and Chao-Jung Wu observe in Polite Chinese children revisited: Creativity and the use of codeswitching in the Chinese complementary school classroom: “The ideology of monolingualism prevails throughout society, including within minority ethnic communities who are bilingual and multilingual.” My take is that if we wish to answer apparently straightforward questions about multilingualism and creativity in any useful way, we must first make sure that we understand what exactly we’re asking, and from within which premises.

Li Wei and Chao-Jung Wu’s topic, codeswitching (sometimes also called code-mixing or simply, mixing), lays bare another very relevant take on multilingualism and creativity. This is the double standard in our theoretical stances about multilingualism, on the one hand, which nowadays is unquestionably ‘good’, against our practical management of being multilingual, on the other, which may not be so good after all, as I pointed out here. Li Wei and Chao-Jung Wu’s statement that “There is still widespread fear of bilingual and multilingual practices such as codeswitching” remains as cogent. So why isn’t codeswitching ‘creative’ (and therefore ‘good’), since it is evidence of multilingualism?

The answer may have to do with what we mean by creativity. Does it have to do with how we use things and languages, or with how many things and languages we use? Quality or quantity? Learning to use what we need to use, for example languages, means learning how they work – their rules, in the descriptive, procedural sense of this word. These rules don’t exist in nature, they emerge from everyday behaviour. But learning rules entails learning how to break them, too, and not playing by the rules is as good a definition of being creative as any. ‘Creativity’, however, depends on who’s deciding which rules – or rather whose rules – can and cannot be broken. This is why we award literary and other prizes to certain rule-breakers: we praise them for doing things outside the box. And this is why multilinguals don’t get prizes for breaking rules when they mix languages: we don’t praise those who do things outside the language.

I’ve dealt before with this misconception that multilingualism is best approached by investigating the languages of multilinguals instead of the language users themselves, and I’ll return to it very soon. Meanwhile, still on the topic of creativity, I’ll have to qualify what I say in my second paragraph, above. The next post, a guest post, offers evidence that rethinking approaches to teaching, and implementing novel methodologies, have more than welcome effects on how we engage with our new languages.

© MCF 2016

Next post: =Guest post= Teaching languages through drama/theatre positively impacts oral fluency, by Angelica Galante and Ron I. Thomson. Saturday 28^th May 2016.

Attitudes to multilingualism – or to multilinguals?

“The human understanding, once it has adopted an opinion, collects any instances that confirm it, and though the contrary instances may be more numerous and more weighty, it either does not notice them or else rejects them, in order that this opinion will remain unshaken.”

            Francis Bacon (1620), Novum Organon 1: XLVI

Few of us might nowadays wish to voice out loud doubts about the ‘benefits’ of multilingualism, or about how and why this current choir of praise came to be. Not all that long ago, however, equally loud choirs were as adamant about the ‘disadvantages’ of multilingualism.

The pendular backlash that we witness today comes from realisation that research supporting multilingualism-is-bad vogues was in fact no research at all, in that it failed to control variables. For example, it compared multilingual children from lower socio-economic strata with monolingual children from higher ones. The turning point dates from 1962, and is credited to Elizabeth Peal and Wallace E. Lambert’s study The relation of bilingualism to intelligence. It also compared multilinguals to monolinguals, but it removed confounding variables to find that “bilinguals performed significantly better than their monolingual controls” on intelligence tests.

From then on, we seem to have decided that if multilingualism isn’t bad after all, then it must be good. Why? Because it doesn’t seem to cross our minds that multilingualism can simply be. Because we can’t but find deviation, which we then label as good or bad, when we randomly take one instance of natural behaviour as ‘the’ instance of natural behaviour: monolingualism has served as this benchmark for far too long. Because when we compare, we look for what’s not there. Multilingualism is bad when we look for what’s not there in multilinguals. Compared to monolinguals, they ‘lack’ vocabulary, for example. Human beings also lack four legs, compared to horses. In contrast, multilingualism is good when we look for what’s not there in monolinguals. Multilinguals ‘outperform’ monolinguals in social empathy, for example. Human beings also outperform horses in vertical locomotion. I find this habit of listing absences a bit like putting in our CV what we haven’t done: not very enlightening, and probably quite wordy.

The question then arises of whether this seesawing of opinions about multilingualism calls into question Francis Bacon’s insight about our understanding. I don’t think so, for two reasons. First, because we go on mistaking opinions for facts which, to me, is the core of Bacon’s observation: we seem to find it exceedingly difficult to look at things without judging them. And second, because the view that multilingualism is special, that is, not normal, and therefore in need of ‘special’ treatment, remains unshaken: we remain comforted that the current ‘findings’ nicely confirm our current expectations, and blissfully immune to whatever facts may shatter our convictions – in which connection I must hail the inclusion of faktaresistens in the list of new Swedish words for 2015, courtesy of Språkrådet.

The current consensual ‘goodness’ of multilingualism, however, doesn’t somehow seem to extend to multilinguals. If it did, why would so many of us keep advising multilinguals to become monolinguals, or treating them like disordered or failed (multi-)monolinguals, or all of the above? Multilingualism is good, but being multilingual apparently isn’t.

This intriguing paradox is rooted in an equally intriguing refusal to deal with multilingualism from a multilingual perspective. Evidence? Look for the sources of judgements about multilingualism and check whether and how they refer to real-life multilinguals. Look for the resonators of these judgements and check their familiarity with real-life multilinguals. Not least, look for the languages in which these sound bites originate and propagate, and check their relationship to real-life multilinguals. Does it show that research on multilingualism (as on virtually anything else) goes on being published and disseminated in a single preferential language? As Anthony J. Liddicoat argues in Multilingualism research in Anglophone contexts as a discursive construction of multilingual practice, this gives “the impression that research communicated in other languages is of marginal relevance for researching the multilingual world. [...] The monolingualism that exists within the research field is not only a linguistic phenomenon, but can also be understood as the development of a monoculture of knowledge [my emphasis].” Liddicoat concludes that “research into multilingualism largely constructs multilingualism as a subject to be studied from a perspective that lies outside the phenomenon of multilingualism itself”. That is, outside of what multilinguals do.

This is why we’re not being multilingual, we’re being rude, or showing off, or refusing to answer ‘simple’ questions like in which language do we think, dream, swear or count, or like which country (or better still, nationality) do we plead allegiance to. This is why schools favour curricular multilingualism in the (desirable) languages that matter to the school over actual multilingualism in the (real-life) languages that matter to the children, as Jasone Cenoz showed in a guest post to this blog, and I’ve also discussed here.

This is why having to ‘deal with’ multilinguals appears to raise adrenaline to such levels that intelligent, sensible people lose their linguistic bearings – and their commonsense. One example: my family’s friends, speakers of either Portuguese or Swedish, knew that our children, then aged 2 or 3, were being raised in both languages. The children naturally used Swedish or Portuguese according to interlocutor and, as naturally, used 2-3-year-old versions of each language. But, because the children were known to be ‘special’, being multilingual, some of these friends used to apologise to them for not being able to use “their language” (i.e., ‘the other one’), and they did this in English, a language that they also knew wasn’t part of the children’s repertoire at the time. The persuasion that multilinguals must have one and only one ‘good’ language, which never is the one that they are using at any given time, was shared by our relatives, and unsurprising to me. But I had to marvel at the additional assumption that English might well be a sort of innate language that everyone who acts linguistically less conventionally understands by default.

Such attitudes to multilinguals stem from judgemental discussions of multilingualism which pay lip service to the stylised -ism contraption that results from dysfunctional reverse engineering of bits and pieces of imaginary multilinguals. From there to assuming that real-life multilinguals must abide by idealised conceptions of multilingualism is but a small step indeed. We keep looking at what’s not there.

Which reminds me of another quote, this time from my fellow countryman and Nobel laureate José Saramago, in his novel about the death of one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms, O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis: “não somos o que dizemos, somos o crédito que nos dão” (‘we aren’t what we say, we are the credit we’re given’ [my translation]).

Paul Klee, O! die Gerüchte! 

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

Next time, I’ll deal with creativity. Are multilinguals also ‘specially’ creative?

© MCF 2016

Next post: Multilinguals and creativity. Saturday 30^th April 2016.

Being multilingual in clinic

When we feel that we’re not feeling quite like ourselves, we may choose to consult a specialist in (un)well-being to find out what might be going on. Our decision will draw on what feeling well has felt like to us, which is our baseline for comparison. In order to decide that we’re unwell, in other words, we compare ourselves to ourselves.

Children can’t make decisions of this kind on their own, so we adults will have to step in on their behalf. But who are ‘we’? We parents may resort to the same kind of baseline that we use for ourselves and compare the child to itself, because no one knows our children better than we do. This is true of suspected language disorders, too: if a child who is less lively than usual may be running a fever, so a child who is using, say, fewer words than usual may be having language problems. We teachers, in contrast, are of necessity less likely to get to know the children in our care in as much detail. This is why teachers are also more likely to compare individual children to generally accepted norms which, also of necessity, were standardised through other children. Because such norms are standardised, that is, statistically validated, they claim an impartiality which cannot always be ascribed to parental norms.

Most referrals of multilingual children to special/remedial services come from school, typically following subpar ranking in language aptitude screening procedures in the school’s mainstream language. Tests in other languages that the children may use, where available, will show similar results, raising suspicion that the children lack a complete language or, as described in Jeff MacSwan’s report The “non-non” crisis and academic bias in native language assessment of linguistic minorities, that they are non-nons: nonverbal in all of their languages. Failure to perform up to test standards is in all good faith feared to reflect a linguistic disorder.

Enter the clinician who, to a significantly higher degree than a teacher, will also be a stranger to the child. Like the child’s teachers, the clinician will typically be unfamiliar with multilingual linguistic behaviour, a finding that my study Assessing multilingual children in multilingual clinics. Insights from Singapore was the first to report for clinicians who are themselves multilingual. Like the tell-tale school tests, the assessment instruments available to the clinician will as typically be monolingual, normed for (mainstream) monolinguals, and thereby likely to confirm a diagnosis of disorder. The child now has a clinical record, having been duly sanctioned as special by a specialist.

But there is a snag. Several, actually, which can be summarised like this: the languages of a multilingual cannot be monolingually ‘complete’, because multilinguals aren’t monolinguals. It is the persuasion that they should be that leads to mistaking their full linguistic repertoire for a null linguistic repertoire. The assumption that testing one of the languages of a multilingual – *any* of the languages of a multilingual – yields reliable insight about multilingual linguistic ability draws on three misconceptions. First, the belief that multilingualism is the addition of monolingualisms that I’ve termed multi-monolingualism. It’s not: if multilinguals could use all of their languages in the same way that monolinguals use their single one, they wouldn’t need all of their languages.

Second, the persistent confusion between the two meanings of the word ‘language’. Language disorders affect all the languages of a multilingual, and cannot therefore be diagnosed from proficiency, or test scores, in one particular language.

And third, the myth that monolingualism equals unquestionable linguistic health, whereby we misrepresent deviations from single-language tests as linguistic impairment. Since the tests are monolingual but the child is multilingual, multilingualism must be the cause of deviation, if not the deviation itself, and must therefore be eradicated. Treating the child for multilingualism will, no less, fail to identify and remedy disordered multilingualism, which research such as Kathryn Kohnert’s, and Elizabeth Peña’s and colleagues has shown must take into account the child’s full linguistic repertoire. Why? Simple fairness: that’s what we do for monolingual children.

Encouragingly, there is growing awareness among professionals that monolingual assessment tools should be used with great caution for multilingual populations. Brian A. Goldstein alerted to this in a guest post to this blog, Providing clinical services to bilingual children: Stop Doing That!, and so did I, in a book chapter titled Sociolinguistic and cultural considerations when working with multilingual children. 

The question then arises of how to assess the language ability of children who use languages for which there are no norm-referenced tests, or who don’t share a language with the clinician. The tempting answer is that this is virtually impossible, because of the ‘complexity’ of multilingualism: there are just too many multilingualisms, given the number and type of languages involved in each individual’s case. But if this is true, then it is also true that there are too many monolingualisms as well: if multilinguals in languages A, B and C are fundamentally different from multilinguals in languages Y and Z, then monolinguals in C are as fundamentally different from monolinguals in Y – which is an additional reason why multilinguals shouldn’t be assessed by monolingual standards: monolingualism, like multilingualism, matters locally, so which monolingualism do we choose?

The factual answer is that dynamic assessment provides methods of evaluating language ability regardless of ability in specific languages, and that clinicians can avail themselves of practical assessment guidance where no shared language of intervention exists. This is the topic of an article currently in press, authored by the International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech of which I am a member, and titled Tutorial: Speech assessment for multilingual children who do not speak the same language(s) as the speech-language pathologist.

Multilingual children must be assessed as multilinguals, so we can tell whether their language development raises cause for concern. The reason why multilinguals outnumber monolinguals in special/remedial care is that we go on blaming multilingualism for deviations to our assessment standards, instead of querying the appropriateness of those standards. Multilinguals are special only in the special attention we keep paying to them, to which I turn next.

Cruz-Ferreira, M. (2012). Sociolinguistic and cultural considerations when working with multilingual children. In S. McLeod & B. A. Goldstein (Eds.), Multilingual Aspects of Speech Sound Disorders in Children (pp. 13-23). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Cruz-Ferreira, M. & Ng, B.C. (2010). Assessing multilingual children in multilingual clinics. Insights from Singapore. In M. Cruz-Ferreira (ed.). Multilingual Norms (pp. 343-396). Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Kohnert, K. (2007). Supporting two languages in bilingual children with primary developmental language disorders. In Kohnert, K. Language Disorders in Bilingual Children and Adults. San Diego, CA: Plural.

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. 

McLeod, S., Verdon, S., & International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech (2017). Tutorial: Speech Assessment for Multilingual Children Who Do Not Speak the Same Language(s) as the Speech-Language Pathologist. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. DOI: 10.1044/2017_AJSLP-15-0161

Peña, E., Bedore, L., & Kester, E. (2016). Assessment of language impairment in bilingual children using semantic tasks: two languages classify better than one. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 51 (2), 192-202. DOI: 10.1111/1460-6984.12199

© MCF 2016

Next post: Attitudes to multilingualism – or to multilinguals? Saturday 2^nd April 2016.

Being multilingual in school

Schooling nurtures development of academic ways of talking about things. This has come to be called ‘education’, in the sense that an ‘educated’ person is able to use language in this way. Schooling teaches us how, why and with whom our languages can be used to acquire knowledge formally, about history, chemistry, or geography, things that not all of us will have encountered at home, by these or any other names. It also teaches us that knowledge, of these and other things, can come to us from strangers, not just from people whom we’ve been familiar with from birth.

Since all of us must be schooled in some language, those strangers will use their language(s) to us. This means that we’ll be facing new ways of using our old languages, or new ways of using new ones. For some children, the ability to switch use of their language(s) appropriately, according to purpose, topic or interlocutor, won’t be new at school start. Preschoolers know how to deal with linguistic register (the technical term for this) both passively, as Laura Wagner and colleagues report in Development in children’s comprehension of linguistic register, and actively, as Melissa Redford and Christina Gildersleeve-Neumann show in The development of distinct speaking styles in preschool children.

For all children, however, using languages in school-bound ways will be new, because school will be a new environment to them. For multilingual and monolingual children alike, home and school uses of language won’t match. Tradition has it that we label such monolingual uses ‘language varieties’ (or dialects, or registers) and multilingual ones ‘languages’, although what the children will need to learn is exactly the same: to sort out their linguistic resources appropriately.

All of us, young and old, learn to manage register switches on the job and because of different jobs. Children will acquire school uses of language by being exposed to those uses and practising them in a school environment, just like they acquired home uses of language through exposure and practice at home. Exposure and practice is what teaches us linguistic skills, and what generates awareness that our languages offer differentially appropriate choices to what we wish to say. We’re not born knowing how to use our languages before we start using them.

Home and school uses of language are, indeed, differentially appropriate, each befitting its environment qualitatively. They do not represent the gradable quantities of linguistic competence that popular and very unfortunate labels such as ‘basic’ (for home uses) and ‘academic’ (for school uses) appear to imply, whether applied to languages or language varieties. In the case of multilinguals, reliance on judgemental labels such as these has meant repression of all their languages except the ‘good’, ‘rich’, worth-developing school language.

Forbidding the use of the home language(s) not just in class but in school premises may no longer involve the physical violence it once did, for both spoken and sign languages, but advice to parents to switch to the school language at home, in order to “enhance” their children’s academic performance still abounds. Such advice may include threatening assertions of dire consequences, for the children, of continued use of “too many languages at home”. Parents in multilingual families keep writing to me agonising over what to do about this, given their inability to use the school language in school-bound ways, or to use it at all, or their unwillingness to comply, objecting to what they deem an intrusion: just like school language practices are decided in school, not at home, home language practices are decided at home, not in school.

School recommendations of this kind reflect an intriguing view that multilingual schoolchildren must strive to become monolingual both in school and at home. They come not only from local schools in places traditionally associated with monolingualism, but also from international schools, whose designation itself traditionally associates with multilingualism. Why should multilingualism be undesirable for academic achievement? The answer might lie in simple ignorance of what multilingualism is.

There is, first, the myth that multilingualism is subtractive by definition, whereby learning a new language means losing other languages. Second, the myth that only one language can promote ‘higher’ academic goals. And third, the myth that only school languages and school environments support intellectual sophistication. What’s ‘basic’, I wonder, about cooking dinner with our children, say? This is likely to take place at home rather than in school, through home languages rather than school ones, and this is doing science, besides being an excellent (and fun) way of honing cultural, gastronomic and maths skills.

Other reasons to promote mainstream monolingualism, equally rooted in zero-sum ideologies, relate instead to power relations within communities. Entitlement to one’s languages (and to calling them languages rather than, say, dialects) carries entitlement to what those languages represent, and therefore threatens the entitlement of the powers that be to decide who is entitled to use which languages. Do we want to pursue the scenario described in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451? On first suspicion of Guy Montag’s deviation from standard book burning rituals, Captain Beatty lectures him: “We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, [...] but everyone made equal.” And he adds: “[T]he home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That’s why we’ve lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we’re almost snatching them from the cradle.”

Or do we want to make it clear to ourselves and the children in our care that there is no conflict between home and school uses of language because they serve distinct environments? To my mind, school would be an ideal environment to teach children both that using language(s) at home and in school is a matter of appropriate choices, and why these choices matter. Where else, in fact, can we be educated about this? Simply suppressing inappropriate home uses of language in school won’t work, because we can’t make choices if we don’t know that there are choices to make.

School-bound linguistic resources are not synonymous with ‘linguistic resources’, whether we’re monolingual or multilingual. We can talk about anything in any language, if we so wish, because the languages aren’t in charge: we are. If using the same language at home and in school were the key to enhanced academic accomplishment, children growing up in monolingual environments would outperform their multilingual peers academically. I’m sure that the parents who worry about these school recommendations would be very interested to know about research supporting this. So would I.

In contrast to mythical beliefs in redemption through ‘higher’ monolingualism, what research does show is that nurturing the learners’ full linguistic repertoire in school favours academic achievement. Virginia Scott and María José de la Fuente show this in their paper What’s the Problem?, and so does Joana Duarte in Migrants’ educational success through innovation: The case of the Hamburg bilingual schools.

Nurturing schoolchildren’s multilingualism, by the way, doesn’t mean the other mythical absurdity that everyone in school must become fluent in everyone else’s languages. It means nurturing schoolchildren’s multilingualism. See, for example, Maurice Carder’s book, Bilingualism in International Schools. A Model for Enriching Language Education; or Jean-Jacques Weber’s Flexible Multilingual Education. Putting Children’s Needs First, on which the author contributed a guest blogpost to this forum; or Sandie Mourão and Mónica Lourenço’s collection Early Years Second Language Education, to which I wrote a Foreword.

Being multilingual in school is a norm, not an affliction to excise. I mean the word norm quite literally: multilinguals are special only when misconstrued through monolingual lenses. This is why most referrals of multilingual schoolchildren to ‘special/remedial’ intervention come from schools where monolingualism still reigns as unquestionable benchmark of linguistic skills. The next post has some more on this.

Duarte, J. (2011). Migrants’ educational success through innovation: The case of the Hamburg bilingual schools. International Review of Education, 57 (5-6), 631-649. DOI: 10.1007/s11159-011-9251-7

Redford, M.A., & Gildersleeve-Neumann, C.E. (2009). The development of distinct speaking styles in preschool children. Journal of speech, language, and hearing research, 52 (6), 1434-48. PMID: 19951923

SCOTT, V., & FUENTE, M. (2008). What's the Problem? L2 Learners' Use of the L1 During Consciousness-Raising, Form-Focused Tasks. The Modern Language Journal, 92 (1), 100-113. DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-4781.2008.00689.x

Wagner, L., Greene-Havas, M., & Gillespie, R. (2010). Development in Children’s Comprehension of Linguistic Register. Child Development, 81 (6), 1678-1686. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01502.x


© MCF 2016

Next post: Being multilingual in clinic. Saturday 5^th March 2016.

Being multilingual at home

Apportioning of linguistic space to the languages of a multilingual family is best viewed as a process rather than a final product, in that what once seemed like a sensible, natural choice may prove irrelevant or unnecessary later on. My family, for example, started off with two home languages and ended up with three, when the children realised that they, too, were entitled to decide who speaks what to whom. A transcript of a dinner table conversation involving all five family members documents this transition, in Chapter 10, section ‘Language dominance?’, of my book Three is a Crowd?, available online.

Multilingual home language policies, in other words, must serve all involved, and must evolve with them, independently from the linguistic landscape outside the home. This is also true of monolingual home language policies in same-language monolingual settings – whether we choose to call them by this or any other name. The point is that home uses of any language do not match the broader community’s, including school uses, because home is not the broader community: we don’t talk about the same things in the same way with the same people, at home and outside.

The fact that home and community environments are different, and therefore demand different linguistic expression, needs to be made very clear: a common misconception has it that ‘knowing a language’ means being able to use it in all possible ways. Nothing could be further from the truth, whether for native languages or for languages learned in school. Children nurtured in home Portuguese, say, won’t automatically develop ability to use school Portuguese, just like educated, literate adults may have no idea how to use their language(s) for academic publication or business purposes, for example. In The Ecology of Language, Einar Haugen further observed that linguistic knowledge is individual: “the competence [each child] acquires is different from that of every other child”.

Our children acquire the uses of language to which they are exposed, in those environments where their language(s) come to make sense. It follows that home uses of language serve home linguistic needs, developing their own norms out of daily interaction. Each home language will in addition serve those needs in different ways, say, mum’s language for playground outings or baking cakes, dad’s for story time or cooking pasta.

Language-related playground and pasta activities are probably as common in multilingual homes as in monolingual ones, but using stern-sounding words like ‘policy’ or ‘management’ to single out what goes on, linguistically, in multilingual homes, might explain why so many parents in multilingual families raise concerns about which languages to use at home with their children, and how. Policy and management discourses suggest that there are one-way roads, no-nos, accepted conventions, fatal errors, and best procedures that we parents ought to research in depth before we even think of opening our multilingual mouths at home. But are there, really? And who’s saying so?

I think that having to learn parenting, on the job, is enough to keep us quite busy, without the need to overburden ourselves structuring language plans to fit breastfeeding timetables, potty-training management and tantrum-dealing policies. Parents don’t write to me agonising over whether to wear a sari, or a cheongsam, or jeans, in front of their children, so why should the languages that go together with clothing, or food, or songs, or celebrations, or anything we do at home create a fuss? We just introduce our children to our (and their) languages in the same way that we introduce any other tenets of our (and their) cultural background.

Introducing languages to our children doesn’t mean ‘teaching’ them in any formal sense of this word: it means using our languages to serve our daily routines. In this way, we teach our children what matters to us and to them, our languages included. The children will learn much more from what we do and what we have them do with our languages, naturally, spontaneously, every day, than from what we think we can teach them about those languages in dedicated ‘language-learning’ sessions. Effective language lessons don’t target the languages themselves, because we learn best by using what we’re learning.

The number of home languages comes a close second among parents’ concerns, expressed in fears that there may be too few or too many languages around a child. On the too-few side, parents worry that their children may not become multilingual enough, soon enough, to corner the job market once they grow up, as I discussed before. Since we can’t predict job markets 20 or so years from now, I usually reassure parents that their babies aren’t likely to miss out on anything by not learning an extra language before they can walk.

On the too-many side, especially in connection with a move abroad, parents ask me about replacing one or more of their languages with the host country’s (usually) single language at home – sometimes monolingually –, on the grounds that what matters is their children’s swift integration in the new environment. This certainly resonates with globe-trotting parents, but I remain doubtful that this strategy may nurture a home away from home, for three main reasons. First, as said above, using a language at home won’t facilitate its use in a different environment. Second, children’s linguistic integration in a new community pretty much takes care of itself pretty quickly, as parents who have chosen to retain their languages at home find out, for better or for worse. And third, many of these parents (and sometimes their now grown-up children, too) later report to me regretting this decision: instead of ‘giving’ their children a language, as was their best intention, they’ve deprived them of another/others, and thereby of fluent bonding with the people and the culture using them.

I don’t think there can be too few or too many home languages around a child. There can only be the exact number of languages that matter for the family’s daily business. But homes aren’t isolated bubbles within a larger community, they’re functional parts of it. Two other environments, schools and clinics, are likely to claim entitlement to a say in multilingual home language policies, to which I turn in the next couple of posts.

Haugen, E. (1972). The ecology of language. In Dil, A.S. (ed.). The ecology of language. Essays by Einar Haugen. Stanford: Stanford University Press (pp. 325-339).




© MCF 2016

Next post: Being multilingual in school. Saturday 6^th February 2016.

Multilingualism is about multilinguals

Multilinguals are quite ordinary people. Not only do they outnumber monolinguals, worldwide, they’ve also been around for quite a while and they’re all over the place. Why is it, then, that specialist and lay outlooks alike continue to associate multilingualism with loaded words such as ‘challenge’, ‘complexity’, ‘(super)diversity’, ‘cost’, ‘benefit’, and to collocate the word with vocabulary evoking deviation, like ‘special’ or ‘exceptional’?

I can think of one reason: we’ve somehow lost track of the meaning of the word multilingualism to designate the status of being multilingual, as in the title of this blog, although there is no multilingualism without multilinguals. The result has been that multilingualism, like other -isms before it, acquired a life of its own, whereby we feel free to talk about it without needing to refer to the people that it supposedly describes. Simply using the word, for example, is nowadays a must, in ways that sometimes remind of the reverential tributes we feel we ought to pay to things that we do not really understand, -isms included. The abstract of Hervé Adami and Virginie André’s recent book, De l’idéologie monolingue à la doxa plurilingue: regards pluridisciplinaires, precisely captures the current awed stance about multilingualism, of which this excerpt is worth quoting in full:

“Le vent ayant tourné en faveur de la “pluralité”, sous toutes ses formes, le plurilinguisme est devenu une notion à la mode puisqu’il s’inscrit dans le sacro-saint “respect de la diversité” qui constitue le socle idéologique de la bien-pensance d’aujourd’hui. Dans cette communion collective autour des bienfaits et des avantages du plurilinguisme, on a oublié qu’il devait constituer un objet d’étude plutôt qu’un objet de culte.”

Cult objects tend to develop (evil? benevolent? mysterious?) strangleholds on us common mortals, making us do things and be things that we’re powerless to control. Multilingualism does or doesn’t do this and that to us, ought to be something but mustn’t be the other, we should and should not, can and cannot do so much or so little about it – is this what being multilingual is all about? Do we really want to go on stockpiling opinions about multilingualism until this -ism fad inevitably burns itself out and the next one enters the stage?

Or do we want to start dealing with multilingualism for what it factually is, the natural linguistic state of over half of humankind, across time and space? This means start dealing with people, not words, because multilingualism is about multilinguals. It means start looking at what multilinguals do, how they do it and why, to find out what’s going on, not what we’ve been told must be going on. It means focusing away from two myths which have compounded the purported intractability of multilingualism.

First, the myth that monolingualism is an unquestionable norm of linguistic behaviour, as Liz Ellis was among the first to question in a collection titled Monolingualism. Monolinguals use their single language for all purposes, with all people, at all times. This is not what multilinguals do, whether with all their languages or just one of them. The only similarity between multilinguals and monolinguals is that all of us go about our daily business making use of our full linguistic repertoires.

Second, the myth that observing the languages of multilinguals means observing multilingualism. What we call ‘languages’ exist only in our collective imagination. What we call ‘features of languages’ exist only in linguistic theories – all of which are monolingual-based, by the way. In a collection of essays edited by Anwar S. Dil and titled The Ecology of Language, Einar Haugen reminded us that “[t]he concept of a language as a rigid, monolithic structure is false, even if it has proved to be a useful fiction in the development of linguistics” and that “[a language] has no life of its own apart from those who use it”.

Languages are tools that we create, develop and mould to serve us. They’re not straitjackets to which users must accommodate, a misconception which isn’t exclusive to research on multilingualism but which continues to shape this research. Languages aren’t there to be reproduced and respected as-is, because language users aren’t language curators.

Language users interact with their environment, their linguistic environment included. They are the real-life people that we parents, teachers, clinicians, encounter in our everyday lives, whose real-life language needs we feed, and whose real-life language uses feed back into our own. Language users are, in short, what we need to address. I’ll do that in the next couple of posts, dealing with home, school and clinical environments.

Ellis, E. (2008). Defining and investigating monolingualism. Sociolinguistic Studies, 2 (3). DOI: 10.1558/sols.v2i3.311

Haugen, E. (1972). The ecology of language. In Dil, A.S. (ed.). The ecology of language. Essays by Einar Haugen. Stanford: Stanford University Press (pp. 325-339).

© MCF 2015

Next post: Being multilingual at home. Saturday 9^th January 2016.