“Teaching” children

Many of us seem to have come to associate teaching with the kind of structured teaching that we also associate with schooling. We need set times and places in order to be taught things, we need set syllabuses, preferably with statements about things like teaching purposes, and we need details about things like learning outcomes, preferably complete with a battery of tests which make sure that the learner fits both purposes and outcomes, through the application of things like bell-shaped curves and normal distributions. And, of course, we need teachers.

Many of us also associate teaching children with this kind of teaching. Regular questions that I get from parents in multilingual families reflect these twin beliefs. They want to teach their language(s) to their children, and they wonder about hiring people to do so, about timetables, (online) books and exercise books, and about must-dos and must-not-dos like, you’ve guessed it, accidentally flouting the OPOLicy. Some parents are adamant that teaching languages means teaching their grammar. This isn’t easy, because learning things is never easy, they concede, but it must be taught anyway “because children need to learn something”. Many of us, it also became clear to me from similar correspondence, thus associate learning with laborious no-pain-no-gain kinds of processes.

There are several issues here. First, the assumption that learners can’t learn by themselves. The teaching philosophy behind structured teaching is that learning means being aware that you’re learning, failing which you’re unable to learn at all. Structured teaching is but one kind of teaching, of course. Perhaps not the most effective, either, precisely because it takes learning as dependent on (adult-bound) structured prompting. Second, the assumptions that if you teach little Jenny biology, then little Jenny will have learned biology; and that if Jenny has learned biology, then Jenny must have had biology taught to her. We can, of course, learn without dedicated teaching, just like, alas!, all of us teachers are familiar with dedicated teaching without learning – if you’re into teaching linguistics, have a look at those Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know. Not to mention all those bits and pieces of “hidden curriculum” that we do teach, though unwittingly. One of my students once told me that he had learned two things from my linguistics courses: linguistics, which I knew I was teaching, and my way of teaching linguistics, which I didn’t know I was teaching. And third, the assumption that learning carries effort, which is the point I wish to expand on.

Image © Clipart from clipartheaven.com

Children learn best when they’re not being taught. Do keep in mind that we’re talking children here, often toddlers, so let me rephrase that: children learn best when they’re not being taught in the ways that we adults think that things should be taught. Take, for example, what some adults perceive as “doing nothing”, as when children are mumbling away to themselves in some remote corner of the house, or staring in silence at the moon. To me, respecting the brain activity which must be going on there and then is a brainy activity in itself. Or take play, which many parents view as a waste of precious childhood time and/or as irrelevant to learning. “Idle” people strike us as no-good layabouts, including where they may be, simply, thinking – which is something that a lot of us may well have forgotten how to do, since we’re all so busy engaging in “real”, tangible activities, in order to avoid being seen as no-good layabouts.

Predictably, then, “idle” children strike us as prospective no-gooders. This is why we enrol the tiny things in assorted “schools”, to “teach” them to become proper adults like us – and this is why I have scare quotes in the title of this post. We believe that babies in nappies should be taught to sit still, obey instructions, listen to adults, do things on schedule, say things on cue. We believe that children should learn about their new world like so many of us learn about new countries, by following the hoisted flag of the standard tourist guide. We believe, in short, that children should not be children, in an intriguing revival of Victorian ways of looking at childhood.

Jean Piaget’s take on matters of teaching children makes a lot more sense to me: “When you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself.” If the “his/himself” in this English version of the quotation irks you, by the way, it does me, too. Piaget’s original words are: “Tout ce qu’on apprend à l’enfant, on l’empêche de l’inventer ou de le découvrir.”

This is all the more true of languages, for two reasons. One, that children, like the rest of us, learn best by doing. We may not know that we’re teaching language, without scare quotes, when we’re talking about something else in that language, but we are. As I wrote in an article about child language acquisition, “language learning is going on whenever language is used around children.” The other reason is that learning languages has much more to it than following the guide. In my book Multilinguals are ...?, I noted that “the best language lessons are the ones that don’t target the languages themselves at all” (p. 72).

Structured teaching deliberately steers attention away from what we want to learn, whether we’re children or adults, to what someone else has decided we should be learning. No wonder our learning of languages, whether we’re children or adults, is often fraught with stumbling blocks. The next post has some more to say about this.

© MCF 2013

Next post: Glitches, false starts, and dead ends. Saturday 9^th March 2013.

Speech-language clinics: cultural meeting places?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


© MCF 2013

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

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

by Brian A. Goldstein

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

(Steven Wright)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Understanding is a two-way street.”

(Eleanor Roosevelt)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Brian A. Goldstein 2013

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

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate are “the dreadful words” inscribed at the gates of Hell, in Dante Alighieri’s ‘Inferno’ of his Divina Commedia.

Teacher trainer Leni Dam doesn’t use these exact words, when discussing learners’ prospects at the gates of language classrooms, but her message is as grim:

“You are now entering a foreign language classroom.

Forget that you are normal.”

Image: William Blake (1757-1827), Dante’s Inferno – Wikimedia Commons

To start off with, “foreign language” is a learner-unfriendly term, as I’ve noted before. In addition, Leni Dam believes, like I do, that the traditional tormenting techniques which are in widespread use in language classrooms are all but conducive to eliciting proficient language from learners.

This is because such techniques treat learners like hapless morons. Language syllabuses attempt to persuade thinking and speaking adults and older children that using, for example, the relative positions of pictorial representations of dogs and tables, or of actual classroom pens and pencil holders, is relevant for their everyday uses of the prepositions under and in, respectively. Or that recasting in the past tense sentences like She is my friend or I eat oranges satisfies the learners’ communicative and vocabulary needs out there in the wide, wild world where their new language is used.

Traditional fire-and-brimstone language teaching philosophies of this kind range all the way from the object, through the method, to the purposes of teaching. What is taught is not language, but linguistics; how languages are taught feeds you first what matters least; and why all of this should be taught draws on emulation of impossible and/or irrelevant standards of language proficiency. Such philosophies share a commitment to stifling learner autonomy, whose fostering is, in stark contrast, a core tenet of Leni Dam’s teaching philosophy. No wonder that such teaching results in the pathetic outcomes of “late” language learning, with which we’ve become familiar. You cannot do what you are not taught to do, which is to engage with your new language as a thinking and speaking individual. The learner is nowhere in sight, except to be chastised for the capital sin of having been born too long ago.

To my mind, there is only one way we can claim that learners’ ages are relevant to their language learning, under these teaching conditions: learners’ mental ages are certainly above the performance levels which are expected from syllabus contents, methods and purposes. I do understand why the too-old-to-learn-languages myth took shape and bulk. Since we cannot isolate age as a testable variable in any fair experiment that might (dis)prove its “effects” on language learning, age remains a conveniently murky scapegoat, one which is in addition easy to sell in its crudest form: we’re all getting older, not younger, so there’s not much you can do about ageing. It is also far easier to blame the learners’ age than to have traditional language teaching patriarchs, matriarchs and associated money-making corporate tribes listen to reason.

The age myth spawns sub-myths, as mature mythologies will: if you believe in language dunces, you’ll believe in language geniuses, too. These beliefs are textbook examples of bad science: you disregard all those “old” learners who do acquire proficiency in their new languages, to go on blaming mysterious degeneration for bad outcomes, and invoking mysterious giftedness for good outcomes. Stefka H. Marinova-Todd, D. Bradford Marshall and Catherine E. Snow, in an article titled ‘Three misconceptions about age and L2 learning’, address precisely this issue, in a review of the (lack of) evidence for claims which correlate language learning proficiency with learners’ ages, let alone attribute the former to the latter.

I can understand, as said, the genesis and propagation of the age myth, but I have no sympathy. In the language teaching marketplace, it seems that customers are never right. Instead of serving learners’ needs, whether learners wish to learn languages or the ways of teaching them, what we’re telling them is to abandon all hope of ever using or teaching their new languages like normal human beings. In the pithy words of one of my students, a qualified English language teacher: “Teachers and syllabus writers know what they want students to learn, but they never learn what the students want to learn from them.” (Thank you for your insight, Sopha!)

Other mythical beings and practices abound, where the use of more than one language is in question. The next couple of posts discuss these matters, starting with a guest contribution from a speech-language expert, whose wisdom I’ve had the privilege of featuring at this blog before.

Marinova-Todd, S., Marshall, D., & Snow, C. (2000). Three Misconceptions about Age and L2 Learning TESOL Quarterly, 34 (1) DOI: 10.2307/3588095

© MCF 2013

Next post: =Guest post= Language dominance: A one-way street with oncoming traffic, by Brian A. Goldstein. Saturday 26^th January 2013.

What causes what?

Deciding that something causes something else is not easy. Just look at big current puzzlements about what causes global warming, Alzheimer’s, or youth unemployment, to see what I mean.

Part of the problem seems to be that we like to settle for straightforward answers to questions about causality: things like coffee keeps you awake, or exercise makes you lose weight, have become accepted truths. But complex concepts, of which we lack understanding, such as those we designate by the simple labels global warming, Alzheimer’s and youth unemployment cannot be attributed to simple causes. Conversely, in fact, what do we mean by coffee, or exercise – or multilingualism –, that can have this or that effect, and on whom?

Another part of the problem is that in order to establish that some X causes some Y, we need to make sure that X correlates with Y at all, as I’ve discussed before, and make double sure that we’re not mistaking correlations between X and Y for causality relationships between them. Deciding what correlates with what is not easy either, for two main reasons. First, because correlations between observables do not exist as correlations: we make them. David Hume had this to say about “connexions”, in a section titled ‘Of miracles’ of his 1748 book An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: 

“It being a general maxim, that no objects have any discoverable connexion together, and that all the inferences, which we can draw from one to another, are founded merely on our experience of their constant and regular conjunction; it is evident, that we ought not to make an exception to this maxim in favour of human testimony, whose connexion with any event seems, in itself, as little necessary as any other.”

Second, because we do not experience first-hand most of the correlations we come to make: we inherit them. The cultural expectations which nurture us, from the day that nurturing starts taking effect on us, shape our ways of thinking about things. We “know” that things are as they are because others, before us, “knew” that they are so, and told us that they are so. Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger put it aptly, in their book Jews and Words: “Your ideas are not your ideas. They are the progeny of the bookshelf on your wall and of the language that you inhabit.” (Thank you for the tip, Judy!) I’ll leave the matter of our thinking in languages for some other day.

An additional, crucial part of the problem is that once we settle for whatever answers appeal to us, we stop asking questions. We stop thinking. Our expectations shape the range of the questions that we feel entitled (or are allowed) to ask. Ready-made answers to the questions that we do (not) ask, in turn, make up the theories to which we hold as explanation for our observations. We do not only rest happily with that “knowledge”, but propagate it, too, as it was propagated to us. This is why it takes such a long time, and such a lot of work, to dismiss urban myths: once we satisfy ourselves that a question is answered, we close the door to it, forgetting that we are the ones closing it.

Not seeking answers beyond “the” answer is what leads to superstition: some of us stopped asking why it should make sense to remove, as it were, 4^th or 13^th floors from high-rises in order to avoid the negative karma caused, as it were, by these numbers. We stopped thinking that high-rises still have 4^th or 13^th floors, whatever we choose to call them, and that negative karma is negative only because we trained ourselves to ignore any positive correlations, or any absence of correlations, that these numbers may have. Knowledge (without scare quotes) builds on something else altogether: some of us get hit on the head by a rotting apple falling from a tree and, instead of blaming our karma, wonder about what may have made the apple fall.

There are solid causality relationships that we can safely rely on – at least until new questions displace old answers. For example, that polio vaccination successfully causes the poliovirus to lose its virulence. But I think it’s always good to keep questioning what we think we know about solid and less solid causes and effects. Do we really know that multilingualism “causes” this and that, for example? And can it make sense that the “effects” of multilingualism turn out to be both negative and positive? Or do we keep asking the wrong questions? I find it quite interesting to try to understand what causes such beliefs to endure.

Next time, I’ll return to another popular example of simple causality, which is as entrenched as it is misguided: the one holding that ageing causes language learning abilities to decay.

© MCF 2013

Next post: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Wednesday 16^th January 2013.