Roots and wings

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once wrote that children should be nurtured to grow roots and wings (“Zwei Dinge sollen Kinder von ihren Eltern bekommen: Wurzeln und Flügel.”).

Knowing Goethe’s thought, his juxtaposition of two apparently contradictory upbringing requirements can neither have meant “roots” in the sense of ‘motionless’, nor “wings” in the sense of ‘restless’: he must have meant that we can’t find roots unless we’re able to go look for them, and that we can’t fly unless we also can perch. Roots expand towards where their nutrition comes from, and flying creatures thrive in the homes that they choose to build for themselves. Likewise, we learn to seek what makes us grow and thrive, and flee what doesn’t.

I was reminded of Goethe’s quote years ago, when I read a fascinating book, Elders: Wisdom from Australia’s Indigenous Leaders. In it, Peter McConchie reports one elder as saying: “We always knew the people were okay because they would come home” which, to me, describes the feature which makes a cultural community acknowledge someone as their own: these people knew that they had a home to return to, which means that they had been taught to leave it. And the elder adds: “They knew to get home, it’s instilled in them, in their spirit and in our stories.” I particularly liked this formulation: their individual, winged spirit, was nurtured by our stories, the roots of our culture.

We all start sprouting root feelers as soon as we realise that “home” is just, well, wherever you feel at home. We find our individual bearings in a multitude of environments, whose distinctive cultural, linguistic and personal habits we can only appreciate once we learn to let go of them, so we also learn how to go back to them, if we so wish. There’s nothing like distance, physical or intellectual, to teach us how to take flight and stay rooted which, to me, is what learning about ourselves is all about.

Image © Copyright Hugh Chevallier

Licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

Gianpiero Petriglieri gives a real-life account of what Moving Around Without Losing Your Roots may involve (obrigada pela dica, Karin!). If you read German, Wurzeln und Flügel discusses the topic of this post with the added bonus of two other of my favourite Roots-and-Wings books, Selma Lagerlöf’s Nils Holgerssons Underbara Resa genom Sverige and Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I would definitely include in this list Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince, with which I grew up when I was learning to take flight.

I wonder whether I’ve just given you a couple of ideas to go and visit, or revisit, these books. I’ll certainly do the latter. Reminiscing about them also reminded me that this is the perfect time of year to find a cosy place from where to fly away by means of cosy reading. I’ll be back next year. Meanwhile, I hope you’ll be able to take time to savour your own roots and wings, too.

© MCF 2012

Next post: What causes what? Saturday 5^th January 2013.

Speech and language

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© MCF 2012

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

Language therapy or language tuition?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


© MCF 2012

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

“Wait... *Where* are you from?”

= Acknowledgement =

Muito obrigada, Karin and Ruchika,

for very enlightening correspondence concerning this post

and, not least, for inspiration for the post’s title!

Has anyone ever complimented you on how well you speak your native language? I don’t mean praise for those of us who may be professional speakers, I mean praise for ordinary speakers like you and me. It has happened to me, about Portuguese, from fellow Portuguese and in Portugal, on the grounds that I don’t look very Portuguese (apparently). Before I decided that such episodes were actually quite funny, I had to overcome the unsettling sensation that I had just been insulted by being complimented.

Certain features of speech seem indeed to be expected from certain facial and other physical features (apparently), in the same sense that you wouldn’t expect your pet dog to bray. This is all fine: we all have our stereotypes and associated expectations to live and judge by, which we actually develop in early childhood. But how do we, adults, deal with human beings whose looks and speech don’t match our expectations? We could revise our adult expectations in adult ways, of course, since facts are facts and stereotypes are fiction. More often than not, however, we attempt to make new facts fit old expectations, so we can go on entertaining these. I never understood why it seems so much easier to hang on to useless theories (of which expectations are a subset) which fail to explain observed facts, than to reject flawed theories, in the face of facts which contradict them.

Expectations come complete with labels, the problem being that expected labels cannot obviously account for unexpected facts. Not just labels about looks and speech, either. I remember, for example, a lengthy discussion in the major daily newspaper in one of the places I’ve lived, seriously asking (and seriously getting serious feedback on) whether women over 50 years of age should wear jeans. And I’m just rereading Notre-Dame de Paris, where the destitute Gringoire’s fleeting moment of solace on a day of complete debacle, personified by a dancing and singing young beauty whom he’s persuaded must be a fairy, a goddess, a nymph, is shattered by a sudden realisation: “Hé non! dit-il, c’est une bohémienne.” And Victor Hugo, canny observer of human nature that he was, adds: “Toute illusion avait disparu.” Other mystifying beings likewise cease to mystify once we choose to identify them by means of familiar labels: we can now deal with the labels, and stop bothering about the beings. Just look at the labels that go on being pasted onto multilinguals, as I discuss in my book Multilinguals are ...?

On several occasions, in my teens, revealing my nationality caused Gringoire-like disillusion among international (ex-)friends, who up to then had deemed me quite worthy of their polite company. I’m sure they had their reasons, but my point is that my answers to their questions about where I was from were as straightforward as their dismissal of me upon hearing them: I “was” indeed “from” Portugal, at the time, though I’ve come to doubt whether this place I am from provides the best definition of who I am, period. Or why it should.

Image © Succu 2010 (Wikimedia Commons), adapted (MCF)

Place labels rank high in cataloguing practices: “where we have them” enables retrieval of appropriate decisions about how to relate to them, on the strength of their where. In the face (literally) of people who were, say, born in X from parents born elsewhere, grew up in W, had children in Y and T, then moved to R and Z and, to top it all, speak our language (among others) as well as we do, the same question crops up: “Where are you from?”, with stress on Where and a high-rising tone of bafflement which attempts to secure the “fact” that people must belong somewhere, in the same sense that your pet dog belongs to you.

A single somewhere, that is, because answers revealing pluralities, like “I come from Portugal and Sweden”, don’t seem to pass muster either. The “Wait...” bit in the question usually denotes glitches in processing multi-factual answers to mono-minded questions. Similar questions require simple, i.e. single(minded) answers to it: there must be an X, such that X stands for the place where your biological mother happened to go into labour, which then means that you belong to X. As if you belonged to places – or rather, as if places owned people. You can read a sample of other intriguing questions asked of multilinguals and multiculturals (and also a sample of my production when I’m in sarcastic mode) in this piece, ‘The bilemma in the bilingual brain’, published in Speculative Grammarian, “the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics”.

I’ll have more to say about multilingual “roots” some other day but, next time, I’d like to turn to the effects that classificatory labels can have on children’s academic and overall development. 

© MCF 2012

Next post: Language therapy or language tuition? Saturday 1^st December 2012.

Linguistic ghettos

“Ghetto” is one of those words we probably wouldn’t wish to have tagged on to us and those we hang around with. The meaning of the word denotes shared group behaviours which are perceived to differ from those behaviours shared by other groups, but connotes judgements of value = ‘not good’. Ghetto behaviour is also generally perceived to be minority behaviour – or it wouldn’t be deemed worthy of a special label. Like elite behaviour? Elites are also perceived as special minorities, the difference being that the word “elite” usually connotes judgements of value = ‘good’.

Judgements about “minority” behaviour don’t pass historical or geographical scrutiny – just look at judgements about multilingualism. What was yesterday and/or here the hallmark of a ghetto becomes mainstream hip today and/or elsewhere. The BBC recently reported on the current comeback of lederhosen and dirndl dresses in Austria, which I found all the more interesting because I didn’t know dirndl dress had ever been out, in the country: in the town just outside Vienna where my family lived, dirndl was what we saw all around us for shopping, working, visiting friends and eating out. Elite behaviours, in turn, become stigmatised, not least linguistic ones: see for example the discussion about the (no longer so) prestigious RP accent (Received Pronunciation) in these two articles, both dealing with choices of accents for purposes of language teaching, and both playing with the acronyms RP and RIP in their titles, one by Paul Tench and the other by Ronald Macaulay.

We seem nevertheless happy to stick to our habits of portraying linguistic uses as belonging to linguistic ghettos (or elites), by keeping the respective judgemental connotations of these words without having to use the words. In monolingual settings, we can equate our local mainstream linguistic standard with unqualified standards of language, and thereby feel entitled to issue judgements about outsiders to those standards. One of my children spent a term studying in northern Portugal, where she was gently chided, but chided anyway, for using the Lisbon dialect. This is the dialect my children inherited from me and which also counts as official “standard” in the country. There were misunderstandings, and there was, above all, lingering innuendos, from both parties involved, that the misunderstandings were due to the outsider.

In multilingual settings, we can let it be known, for example, that monolingualism is the mainstream standard. For language teaching purposes, we can also characterise one standard of one language as “the” good one (= ‘elite’ one), and either find ways of dismissing alternative standards, or set our choice standard as a learning goal which, for all practical purposes of language use, we nevertheless know to be either unattainable or irrelevant to learners.

We can further insist that immigrant communities (choose to) isolate themselves from other communities in their new country, forgetting that the country’s natives do exactly the same – in this connection, I must point out the title of a New Zealand-based academic journal, which I’ve only recently come across: AlterNative which, to me, puts talk of natives and nativeness in its right perspective. And we can say that learners and users of “our” language(s) keep falling short of (our) expectations concerning conformism to (our) standards. I have heard many language teachers lament, or empathise, that their students keep their new language well differentiated from taught versions of it, for reasons of “fossilisation”, or “identity”, respectively.

Some of us may indeed choose to remain in the cosiness of our ghettos, for reasons akin to self-defence. Loraine K. Obler, in an article titled ‘Exceptional second language learners’, had this to say about choices of accent in a new language: 

 

“[...] one must be willing to sound like someone from another culture, but one must be willing to give up the protection that being foreign confers, since native speakers may make allowances for grammatical errors when the speaker is obviously not a native speaker and thus the person is protected from sounding foolish.”

Some of us may instead choose to sway in and out of ghettos, according to which image of ourselves we wish to project in time and place, something that we learn to do as children. Ghada Khattab, in a book chapter titled ‘Phonetic accommodation in children’s code-switching’, showed that immigrant children use home-accented speech to heed home expectations of mainstream language use, and mainstream-accented speech to establish identity credentials among monolingual users of the mainstream language.

This ability to accommodate to the people who are significant to us, which I’ve addressed before and will come back to some other day, is of course a human ability, regardless of how many languages are involved in it. For multilinguals, however, it seems to associate with an uncanny inability to give simple answers to what some people take to be simple questions. Like the question in the title of my next post.

© MCF 2012

Next post: “Wait... *Where* are you from?” Wednesday 21^st November 2012.