Multilingual ‘deficiencies’ or assessment deficiencies?

The Roman poet Juvenal is credited with asking Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?, sometimes translated as ‘Who guards the guardians?’ The question doesn’t boil down to simple word play: guardians do need their own guards, as much as teachers need teachers, or doctors doctors. Assessments need assessments, too. Unfortunately, where assessment of linguistic communicative abilities is concerned, particularly among multilingual children, the consensus about X needing X appears to break down.

Communication takes place through the use of a shared code (e.g. a language), by means of code-bound rules that enable coding and decoding of messages between a sender and a receiver, respectively. It follows that if the code is not shared, there will be either no communication or deficient communication, which would seem to be a pretty basic inference to draw. Assessment tool designers, however, apparently believe instead that any code that happens to be familiar to them is, or should be, shared by any potential test-takers.

The rationale behind communicative ability tests in common use in schools and speech-language clinics hinges on two assumptions: first, that languages amount to sets of well-defined, discrete items and rules such as sounds, words, or word order which, being quantifiable, will provide a straightforward and statistically reliable measure of the test-taker’s ‘command’ over them; and second, that languages are clear-cut entities enjoying a stable, homogeneous life of their own which is independent from the uses that their users make of them. These two assumptions make it clear that language proficiency tests assess linguistic mechanics, not linguistic use, and explain the belief that any language is, or should be, shared by all of its users, in the same way.

Communicative assessment tools test single languages, those that are normed to represent the official (or national, or mainstream, or ‘standard’, or ‘good’) variety of the language in use in the official institutions where assessment happens to take place. Being designed to evaluate ideal monolingual uses of language, they naturally fail to account for real-life multilingual communication abilities. It is therefore small wonder that multilingual children’s test scores remain under (monolingual) par, resulting in suspected or confirmed diagnoses of communicative ‘deficiency’, first in school and then in clinic, to where schoolchildren are referred and where the same traditional assessment instruments are used. The deficiency lies instead in inappropriate use of assessment tools among multilingual populations – a deficiency that extends to assessment of users of non-‘standard’ monolingual varieties.

Current assessments of communication abilities among multilingual children safeguard a mythical ‘integrity’ of the languages in which assessment necessarily takes place, to the detriment of language users.

Image: EducationMattersMag, via MCERA

In Plato’s Republic, the guardians of Kallipolis should educate their souls in, among other virtues, wisdom, courage, and justice, because it is always better to be just than unjust. The same applies, to my mind, to those who should assess assessment tools, to ensure that they represent a fair assessment of what they purport to assess. This is no word play either. I take the lack of scrutiny in academic and clinical assessment matters to constitute a violation of human rights, and I contributed an article on this topic to the special edition of the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Assessment of communication abilities in multilingual children: Language rights or human rights? As I say in the conclusion to the article, “Ensuring that children can exercise their right to communicate […] remains with those who can speak for them”.

© MCF 2018

Madalena Cruz-Ferreira (2018). Assessment of communication abilities in multilingual children: Language rights or human rights? International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 20 (1), 166-169. DOI: 10.1080/17549507.2018.1392607

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 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.

Textbook languages

Wanting to learn a language doesn’t always result in learning the language that we want. This is so even when the language that we want to learn and the one that we end up learning go by the same name – let’s call it X. One reason for this is that most language teaching proceeds through what we’ve come to identify as the language’s holy writ, namely, the X textbook.

A textbook is a book. Like all books, it uses printed modes of language, with two consequences: first, that textbooks can’t serve those of us who wish to learn to speak X, because spellings do *not* represent actual speech. The printed nature of textbook languages is what explains, among other things, the proverbial failure of X learners to acquire X-like accents – for which the learners are conveniently blamed, by the way. Is it any wonder that accents learned through print remain print-like?? The second consequence is that only those of us who are literate can access textbooks. This includes e-books and other e-novelties in written form, in that technological innovations seem to have had no noticeable effect on pedagogical innovation.

Lärobok i tyska språket (1858)

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

A textbook is also a grammar of X. Rather than real-life X, it offers boring, trite, irrelevant, at worst embarrassing, at best infantile examples of dialogues (sentences, situations, narratives, descriptions) for learners to memorise and/or enact, which are tailor-made for the sole purpose of introducing points of X grammar. The etymological relationship of the word grammar to printed modes of language is the likely reason behind this strange pedagogy. The facts are that we’ve been teaching languages in this way since the Ancient Greeks.

A textbook is, further, a preview of things to come, namely, its twin sidekicks tests and exams, also holy writ. Textbooks contain the correct answers that we learners will need to provide to printed assessment questions, in order to have our learning of X certified, also in print. The teaching-to-the-test nature of language textbooks is what explains that certified X learners can’t use X. On my first visit to an English-speaking country, Britain, I brought along nine solid years of enviable marks in my school English. As soon as I landed, I realised that I could both describe the past perfect continuous and declaim perfectly grammatical sentences like ‘My sister’s bookcase is taller than mine’ to anyone who would listen (no one would), but that I couldn’t order a snack or communicate with bus drivers, receptionists, or anyone else in sight. I had no idea what language they were speaking over there, I’d never heard it before. Or seen it, for that matter: brochures, placards, newspaper articles, were as unintelligible to me. And I won’t bore you with what happened in my later encounters with this ‘same’ X in places like India, Hong Kong, Australia or Singapore, for example.

A textbook is, finally, a publication. Like all publications, textbooks have editions, copyrights, publishers, distributors, marketers, advertisers, sellers, prices, and they are dated, in both senses of this word. They also have authors who, in the case of language textbooks, are often monolingual. What language textbooks seem to lack is a specific readership. Since the ideal publication must appeal to ‘any’ consumers, they’re invariably geared to “anyone seeking to improve their X”, or “X learners from any language background”. The problem is that one-size-fits-all language products fail to serve any consumers, for the simple reason that real life is anything but one-size-fits-all: language users, in real-life times and real-life places, are what makes up any X.

Through their equally time- and space-bound makers, textbooks serve the languages that they feature in their titles, rather than the language learners, who are instead brainwashed into believing that they must accept what ‘the market’ has on offer. This is why textbook languages disregard local cultures, as Ross Forman reports in How local teachers respond to the culture and language of a global English as a Foreign Language textbook, or John Gray discusses in The Construction of English. Culture, Consumerism and Promotion in the ELT Global Coursebook. This article from The Economist, The mute leading the mute, shares equally interesting insights on this matter.

This is also why textbook languages allow no room for learners’ engagement with them, to make them theirs by building the common ground that using a language means, not least where accents are concerned. You need to follow the book: questioning (textbook contents, methods or goals) and thinking (about alternative language uses and how they might work), which define healthy learning, are discouraged as a waste of precious time needed to prepare for almighty assessment pieces. 

I see no reason why we should remain in awe of the magic of printed symbols and go on teaching languages the way we were taught. No reason, in fact, to let any one-size-fits-all standard symbology constrain our engagement with people and their languages. This seems to be common practice in clinical settings, for example, and I’ll come back to this specific issue very soon. Meanwhile, the next post, authored by a guest whom I’m delighted to welcome to this blog for the second time, offers broader reasons for ways in which we currently engage with fellow human beings.

Forman, R. (2014). How local teachers respond to the culture and language of a global English as a Foreign Language textbook. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 27 (1), 72-88. DOI: 10.1080/07908318.2013.868473


© MCF 2015

Next post: =Guest post= Language, multilingualism and racism, by Jean-Jacques Weber. Saturday 8^th August 2015.

Native multilinguals

Some of my language teaching students sometimes express out loud their heartfelt desire to become native speakers. I was quite baffled the first time I heard this: we’re all native speakers, surely, and we can’t become natives, if we take the word “native” to mean what I supposed it is meant to mean, ‘from birth’. But does it? It turned out that my students’ previous teacher training had included the mantra that “native” means ‘flawless’ in this collocation, and flawless, whatever we take this word to mean, is certainly something that all of us can at least aspire to become.

This latter meaning of the word “native” has in fact been made quite explicit in the literature about “second” (or “foreign”) languages – with my profuse apologies for the scare quotes that will crop up all over this post: I’ve no idea what the scared words might mean, in this literature. This meaning explains, for example, why some of us think it a worthwhile endeavour to compare school language learners to “native speakers”, for purposes of language quality assessment. But there is a snag: if learning languages from birth entails flawless use of those languages, how come multilinguals across the board, including simultaneous multilinguals who learn more than one language from Day One, go on being compared to “native speakers”?

The thing is that “native speaker” has yet a third meaning, ‘monolingual’, this time a covert one, which nevertheless heeds the overt, systematic practice of comparing any multilinguals to monolinguals. This meaning explains, for example, the virtual absence of acknowledgement that multilinguals can be “native” users of their languages. If we accept that multilingual proficiency should be assessed through comparison with “native” proficiency, then we’re saying that multilinguals and natives are two distinct kinds of language users, since we can’t compare a thing to itself.

But there is another snag. If multilinguals aren’t native users of their languages, then they must be “non-native”, by the logic of the assumedly useful labels which populate research on language uses. However, they aren’t, because multilinguals get compared to non-natives, too. In addition, simultaneous multilinguals can’t be “non-native”, if their languages are there for them from Day One, which is one of the meanings of “native”. Multilinguals, in sum, appear to inhabit a Linguistic No Man’s Land.

“Day One”, unfortunately, may not be what clinches the issue either. If the language(s) in which we’re brought up from birth happen to be imported languages, then those languages aren’t “ours”. And if we learn a new language in early childhood, though not exactly from Day One, how many days should we count to count as a native user of it? Can I, for example, claim French as native language, having lived with it from just before age 3? Or was I then already way past my native learning prime, as I must have been when I learned my other languages several years later? If you’re interested in the mysteries of “critical periods” which snipe at “native” language learning abilities, Carmen Muñoz and David Singleton’s state of the art discussion, A critical review of age-related research on L2 ultimate attainment, is a must-read.

Scare-quoted terminological acrobatics about multilingualism would be hilarious, of course, if it didn’t appear in “serious” research, thereby proving that we’ve no idea what we’re talking about. Have a look in my article First language acquisition and teaching, to see what I mean. The muddle got compounded when researchers developed a preference for labelling the languages of a multilingual by means of numbers, possibly on the belief that identifying things by numbers makes them look scientifically unquestionable. There’s always some “L1” lurking in there somewhere, which means that there must be rankings of L2, ... Ln, where the numbers apparently serve the purpose of showing that languages either politely follow one another or should do so.

But what do these numbers mean when, say, simultaneous multilinguals learn one or more new languages in school? Not much, it seems, because we prefer to stick to labels rather than acknowledge their undefinable uselessness. Since “L1” represents an inherently singular concept (in more than one sense of “singular”), the logic of cardinal and ordinal numbering requires that L1 = “first language”, whereby everyone must have a single “first” language, endowed with rights of primogeniture associated with other firstborns. If there’s no single chronological first language, no problem: we just assign one to children, for reasons of administrative expediency, and call it their “mother tongue”. Finally, by the logic that first = “best”, we end up talking about “dominant” and “balanced” languages, and about all the other hopeless labels which do no more than betray our hopeless beliefs that multilinguals are, in fact, funny monolinguals.

This state of affairs may well explain why multilingualism goes on being blamed for anything that deviates from monolingualism, to which I’ll return some other day. Meanwhile, the next post, a guest post, goes back to where this post started, to report vivid encounters with “nativeness” from a language teacher who’s also had plenty of reasons to wonder about the meaning of this word.








Cruz-Ferreira, M. (2011). First language acquisition and teaching. AILA Review, 24, 78-87 DOI: 10.1075/aila.24.06cru

Muñoz, C., & Singleton, D. (2010). A critical review of age-related research on L2 ultimate attainment. Language Teaching, 44 (01), 1-35 DOI: 10.1017/S0261444810000327


© MCF 2014 

Next post: =Guest post= Nativeness: The curse and blessings of genes, geography and cadence, by Ng Wan Qing Jessie. Saturday 15^th November 2014.

Mother tongue education or flexible multilingual education?=Guest post=

by Jean-Jacques Weber

Mother tongue education is often advocated as the ideal system of education for all children in our late-modern, globalized world. However, in this blog post I provide a critique of mother tongue education, arguing that it is not always the panacea it is frequently made out to be. This is also the theme of my new book, Flexible Multilingual Education: Putting Children’s Needs First, where I criticize mother tongue education programmes for being too rigidly fixed upon a particular language (the ‘mother tongue’), and explore more flexible and more child-focused forms of multilingual education.

A first problem with mother tongue education is what could be referred to as ‘the challenge of superdiverse classrooms’. Indeed, in many classrooms of today’s globalized world, there may be students with a wide range of different home languages, which makes mother tongue education increasingly difficult to implement. This allows governments to opt out of their responsibilities, by means of the commonsensical argument that in any case it would be impossible to organize mother tongue education for each individual child.

A second problem with the call for mother tongue education is that it can involve a kind of arrogance on the part of the (frequently white, Western European or US American) ‘expert’ who tells people what is good for them – e.g. that they should keep up their minority language. It has been too easy for researchers to take an attitude of superiority and to look upon (e.g.) South African parents who prefer their children to be educated through English rather than an indigenous African language as ‘victims of false consciousness’ or as ‘afflicted by an attitudinal malaise or syndrome’.

A third problem is that mother tongue education tends to lead to rather fixed multilingual education systems, because politicians, policy-makers and teachers often rely on a discourse of ethnolinguistic essentialism in attributing a ‘mother tongue’ to the schoolchildren. In many cases, however, attribution of a single mother tongue involves at least a simplification of an increasingly complex multilingual reality. The problem is that ‘mother tongue’ is a politicized concept, and hence not the best one for a pedagogical approach to be based upon.

There is therefore a need to move from rather fixed mother tongue education programmes to more flexible multilingual education. While mother tongue education tends to be focused on the standard variety (the ‘mother tongue’) ascribed on the basis of children’s perceived ethnicity, flexible multilingual education builds upon children’s actual home linguistic varieties, upon the whole of their multilingual repertoires including non-standard varieties, urban vernaculars, etc. Moreover, while mother tongue education tends to provide delayed access to a global language such as English, flexible multilingual education prefers very gradual shifts between local and global languages from an early stage (at least for children with multilingual repertoires).

Furthermore, there is a key difference in the primary aims of flexible multilingual education, as opposed to mother tongue education. The latter is often concerned with the revitalization of a particular local language, which is to be achieved through a struggle against the hegemonic encroachment of (usually) English. In the process, it sometimes overlooks the needs of particular groups of students such as migrant students. On the other hand, the primary concern of flexible multilingual education is to include all schoolchildren and to provide them with high-quality access to the languages that they need for educational and professional success. Take, for example, the mother tongue education systems in francophone Canada or Catalonia. The fact that the system may impede migrant students’ access to a global language such as English is ignored by the mother tongue education advocates, in whose eyes the maintenance of French or the revitalization of Catalan is the overarching goal, in front of which everything else pales in significance.

Finally, with its focus on the standard variety of the assumed ‘mother tongue’, mother tongue education frequently erases non-standard varieties or ‘dialects’, which as a result are not seen as worth preserving. This has happened in Singapore, where the focus on the ‘official’ mother tongue – Mandarin in the case of the Chinese community – involves the deliberate eradication of all other varieties of Chinese. Somewhat surprisingly, even academics tend to look upon this as a highly successful language policy to the extent that it has managed to supplant the different varieties – Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, etc. – with the standard variety, Mandarin. The same is happening in China, where nation-building efforts involve the imposition of standard Chinese – here referred to as Putonghua – and the marginalization of the other varieties of Chinese. In light of the political nature of the distinction between language and dialect, these are very disturbing policies and attitudes that seem to be encouraged by mother tongue education: only the standard variety is perceived as being in need of protection and preservation, whereas non-standard varieties are largely erased and considered to be worthless. Another example of this can be found in parts of South Africa, where some mother tongue advocates object to the use of mixed Xhosa-English varieties in the classroom – though these correspond to many urban children’s actual home linguistic resources – and aim to enforce instead the use of a ‘pure’, standard variety of Xhosa, even though this may seem like a foreign language to many students.

In my book, I explore these and numerous other case studies from around the world and show that flexible and child-centred multilingual education programmes would be preferable to mother tongue education, in that they would allow a full acknowledgement of the hybrid and transnational linguistic repertoires that people actually deploy in our late-modern, superdiverse societies.

Jean-Jacques Weber is Professor of English and Education at the University of Luxembourg. He has published widely in the areas of discourse analysis, multilingualism and education, including Flexible Multilingual Education: Putting Children’s Needs First (2014), Multilingualism and Mobility in Europe (2014), Multilingualism and Multimodality (2013) and Introducing Multilingualism: A Social Approach (2012).

© Jean-Jacques Weber 2014

Next post: Some languages are more languages than others. Saturday 26^th July 2014.

Translators and multilinguals

“You speak so many languages! You should be a translator.” 

 

“What do you mean you can’t translate this memo into English? You speak both languages, don’t you?”

“I don’t speak your other language, I’m afraid. Can you translate what your child is saying, so I can assess her language development?”

Sounds familiar?

There seems to be this deeply ingrained conviction that the words multilingual and translator are synonymous. This is like assuming that those of us who intone ‘La donna è mobile’ while scrubbing our backs in the shower are professional singers, which is quite funny. Translators are indeed professionals, but being multilingual is not a job description.

The reasoning that multilinguals are translators because translators are multilinguals would be just laughable, too, but for the common practices which derive from it. Some of these may be rather harmless, like encouraging multilinguals to choose jobs because they are multilinguals, as in my first example above. Do monolinguals choose their careers because they use one language? The reasoning draws on two misconceptions, one about translators and one about multilinguals.

Translators aren’t people who can say the same things in different languages, and multilinguals aren’t multi-monolinguals who use their languages in order to be able to repeat themselves in them. Languages, whatever they may be, aren’t different containers into which the “same things” can be poured. If they were, we wouldn’t need borrowings, for example, and translators wouldn’t need dedicated training to do their job. Assuming that they don’t explains my second example. Chapters 1, 2 and 12 of my book The Language of Language have some more about why such misconceptions about multilingualism and translation came to be.

Multilinguals use different languages because those languages serve different purposes, but translations make one language serve the purposes of another. This is also why I don’t think that translation is a useful method of learning a new language.

Image © Tsunajima Kamekichi (Wikimedia Commons)

My objections relate to my persuasion that learning languages must mean learning to think in them (or we wouldn’t need to learn them), whereas translation teaches you to manage one language through another. I made this point in an online discussion on this topic, at the academic site ResearchGate. What I didn’t say there was that I’ve never forgotten the pleasure I felt when I first dared to buy monolingual dictionaries of the languages I was learning in school, and found that just reading those dictionaries as you might read a novel taught me more about how to use the languages than I had ever learned before.

Ability to translate demands a degree of awareness of each of the languages involved that multilinguals simply do not posses, as multilinguals. This applies to interpreters too, of course. The main differences between the two concern mode and timing: translators usually deal with printed texts and may be lucky enough to take time to enjoy a nice cuppa once in a while when inspiration lags, whereas interpreters, sometimes called simultaneous translators, usually translate speech or sign on the spot. I happen to have worked as both but, when off-duty, I’m quite like my fellow multilinguals in often having no idea even which language(s) I’m using at any one time.

My third example above illustrates an unfortunate practice in school and in clinic. Relatives (or friends, or neighbours) are co-opted to assist in assessment processes for which they obviously lack qualification, just because they know the language of the child under assessment. It’s like asking common mortals to take screwdrivers and soldering irons to the innards of their laptop, just because they use it every day. My example is actually mild, because children are also asked to translate for the sake of their elders. These two blog posts, authored by speech-language experts, say it all, concerning the effects of translation on assessment procedures and instruments: Brian A. Goldstein’s ‘Providing clinical services to bilingual children: Stop Doing That!’ and Elizabeth D. Peña’s aptly titled ‘Stupid translation’. It is true that little and big multilinguals do translate spontaneously, when they suspect that misunderstandings may arise among users of their languages. But this is much like 7-year-old big sister explaining to baby brother that mum came home in a rotten mood today and it is therefore advisable to tone down the usual level of mum-is-home mischief: we want people to understand what’s going on. Big sister is not a cognitive scientist for that.

Sisterly efforts to generate intelligibility by means of assorted translations must be a good thing: human beings have spent quite a lot of their time as human beings translating their languages for the benefit of fellow human beings. Sometimes, however, it’s not entirely clear whether the purported ability of multilinguals to translate makes them good guys or bad guys. If you can make sense of unfamiliar (linguistic) behaviour, then you must be privy to someone else’s secrets, which makes you not-really-one-of-us. Multilinguals who confess their inability (or unwillingness) to translate may, in addition, seem reluctant to share those secrets with “us”, as my second example illustrates. This may well be why multilinguals appear to have the status of permanent guests in all of their linguistic communities: I often get the uncanny impression that the Traduttore, tradittore quip, which is meant to apply to “disloyalty” to languages, keeps clinging to the multilingual users of those languages and applying to people.

How “disloyal” to whom, then, are those of us who insist that being multilingual means precisely that, being multilingual? The next post, by a guest with whom I’ve had the privilege of working before, argues that a lucid understanding of multilingualism has yet to impact decisions about language education policies.

© MCF 2014

Next post: =Guest post= Mother tongue education or flexible multilingual education?, by Jean-Jacques Weber. Saturday 28^th June 2014.

Expats and immigrants

Have you ever wondered why those of us who move to work in a different country are sometimes called expats and sometimes immigrants? The labels can’t reflect distinct purposes behind the move, because both groups leave previous stomping grounds to seek (perceived) better conditions elsewhere. So I thought of trying to understand the reason for the choice of different labels.

We could start with standard dictionary definitions. Expat(riate): ‘one who lives outside their native country’. Immigrant: ‘one who comes to live permanently in a foreign country’. I wonder why these definitions can’t be swapped, in that neither expats nor immigrants live in their “native” country – or both are “foreigners” in their new country, if we prefer. The word “permanently” appears to hint at a difference, portraying immigrants as having moved for good, whether intentionally or not. I also wonder. Many immigrants leave their country not because they’ve ruled out returning to it, but because the only way to return to it and survive in it involves spending time elsewhere creating the means to do so. On the other hand, if expats count as temporary visitors, I go on wondering what to make of families like mine (we rank as expats, not immigrants), who’ve stayed put in the same country for decades as permanent residents. How permanent is “permanent”?

We could try integration into the host community. Maybe not a good differentiator, on second thought, in that my thesaurus gives ‘alien’ and ‘outsider’ as head synonyms of “foreigner”. Whether quartered in dedicated compounds or roughing it out there in the mainstream jungle, neither expats nor immigrants are renowned for assimilation skills. Perhaps because we all tend to build our home even, or perhaps especially, when away from home? I, for one, don’t see any difference between these two scenarios where I happened to play the role of confidante, the immigrant lady fussing about (substandard) standards of personal hygiene in her new country, and the expat lady who was devastated by her realisation that her favourite (home) brand of coffee wasn’t available where she had moved to.

Could a differential (or do I mean deferential?) guest status in a host nation be it? The word expat does carry nicer connotations than the word immigrant, but connotations have nothing to do with what we are: whatever the labels we go by when we’re working in a new country, we’re aliens. We represent a nation within someone else’s nation, a foreign body in someone else’s eye. Even when we are officially recognised as citizens of more than one country, like my Swedoguese children, that citizenship is always hyphenated and therefore always “special”. Vaidehi Ramanathan’s book Language Policies and (Dis)Citizenship explains the art of using citizenship as a weapon and/or shield, as needed. It is as if the countries ruled over us, people. So no difference there, either.

And then it hit me. The difference must lie in our entitlement to the languages we brought along with us in the move. Expat children attend schools featuring their home language. More often than not, these “international” schools offer monolingual schooling, which means that it’s fine for little expats to stick to remaining monolingual, if they so are and they so wish. Immigrant children attend schools featuring the mainstream language. More often than not, these local schools also offer monolingual schooling, which means that little immigrants must, in principle, become multilingual. I say in principle, because what happens in practice, more often than not, is that little immigrants find themselves discouraged to stick to any other language than the mainstream one.

There might be a few blurry edges here, though. Like immigrant families, multilingual expat families may also need to actively assert their right to keep their languages in good working order, as I report in my book Three is a Crowd?. Matthias Hüning, Ulrike Vogl and Olivier Moliner put it this way, in their book Standard Languages and Multilingualism in European History: because of “the principle of ‘one language, one state, one people’ [...], multilingualism came to be viewed as an undesirable aberration.”

So how do our linguistic “aberrations” further impact the way we are treated, in more than one sense of this word? I’ll look at this next time.

© MCF 2014

Next post: Accent, dialect, or disorder? Saturday 8^th February 2014.

Numbers and languages

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

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

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

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

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

Numbers rule?

Image © clipartheaven.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

© MCF 2013

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