Shibboleths & Co.

The word shibboleth originally designates a specific pronunciation of itself. Failure to pronounce the word in one native way, namely, substituting an ‘s’ sound [s] for a ‘sh’ sound [ʃ], entitled [ʃ]-natives to hack [s]-natives to pieces. It could have been the other way around, of course, given our propensity to nurture murderous feelings towards whoever speaks differently. It all depends on who is wielding the righteous axe at any given place and time.

Many of us have come to believe that making mincemeat (literally) of differently-accented people isn’t really an acquired right, so we’ve come up with civilised ways of obliterating such people instead. We can bully them in school, for example, or refuse them jobs, or force them to lose academic visibility, or just poke fun at them. We can also talk about them as belonging to ghettos, which is a bad thing to belong to, for those of us who belong to good ones.

Likewise, shibboleths can be good or bad. It all depends on who is wielding the righteous standard at any given place and time. When you enrol in language courses, you’re destined (I was going to say “doomed”) to learn what your textbooks deem to be good shibboleths. Whether you like them or not, whether you need them or not, for the purposes which made you enrol in those courses in the first place.

Sometime into your language learning, you are likely to be told that you speak your new language “with an accent”, and should therefore strive to get rid of it, on the (extremely entertaining) assumption that speaking a language well means speaking it without an accent. The claim that a good accent means no accent probably stems from the widespread practice of teaching languages through printed media. Printed languages have no accent, so it’s up to whoever happens to be reading them to provide them with one. Just look (yes, “look”) at the different accents which have been attributed to Latin, for example. This also means that whoever is in charge of teaching you a language can always claim that whatever accent you have in it doesn’t match the “good” one intended by the textbook writers, because they’re native speakers and you aren’t, and native speakers can’t be challenged on matters of “good” language usage. That argument usually cows learners into accent submission.

“Good” and “bad” accents, however, are not simply a matter of native vs. non-native pronunciation practices. As with the original shibboleth incidents, native speakers are more than willing to chop figurative heads (and so offending vocal tracts) off one another as well. I’ve blogged about this before, but Richard Cauldwell, in an article titled ‘Lord Rant: A personal journey through prejudice, accent and identity’ puts it much better than I ever could.

Our accents reflect the ways in which we’ve trained our vocal tracts to produce speech. They match not just what we hear around us but also, and importantly, the ways in which we want to be heard. Until around age 3, we’re not aware that we’re acquiring accents in our languages (or the languages themselves), because we’re not aware of ourselves as independent from our surroundings. From then on, we start being able to pick and choose, be it our friends, our clothes, or our dialects, complete with accent, all of which will become part of who we are. We acquire and lose accents for the same reasons that we acquire and lose languages, and we do this at any age. Just listen to one-time fellow-speakers of your dialect(s) who, as adults, moved to different countries, or different regions of the same country.

Being able to adapt to the surroundings of our choice is a condition of survival. That’s why we, as a species, have been able to inhabit (I was going to say “infest”) every nook and cranny of the world that we are able to perceive. We will adapt, including our accents, if we so wish. Not all of us need or want to learn a new language in order to impersonate some of its other speakers. Learners may want to distance themselves from specific accents of their new languages because, well, learners aren’t free from prejudice either. Perhaps learners will want to acquire the shibboleths which identify them as borrowers of a language, rather than the shibboleths associated with specific lenders of that language. This includes prosodic shibboleths, more on which next time.

© MCF 2013

Next post: Rhythm and clues. Saturday 20^th April 2013.

Children speak child-speak

               
            Me: Children speak child-speak, you know?

            Possibly you: Duh!?

            Possibly you: Of course they do!

            Possibly you: Hellooo (singsong), they’re *children*... (ditto)

            etc.

If your reaction to the title of this post matches one of these (possible) responses to it, I’m with you all the way. But do read on, by all means. I’m not going to tell you that children speak child-speak, I’m going to tell you about those of us who appear to believe that children don’t. And I won’t be telling you only about your average, averagely misinformed layperson, either.

The first time I realised that something must be very wrong with academic treatments of child multilingualism was back in the 1980s, when the literature about “translation equivalents” was making headlines. Briefly, proponents of multilingual equivalence had it that children being raised multilingually should either provide evidence that they had acquired words for the same things in all of their languages, or forfeit their right to be (called) multilingual. Being multilingual was then viewed as being what I call multi-monolingual: multilingual children are just like monolingual children, only several times over. Implicitly, the claim was that multilingual adults must also be multi-monolingual, on the understanding that children don’t typically remain children all their lives.

If you’re shaking your head in benevolent disbelief at how this kind of nonsense could ever have made headlines, then don’t. Not just because nonsense about multilingualism keeps making headlines, but principally because this claim appears to have resurfaced lately: one announcement of a meeting on multilingualism, dating from only a few weeks ago, states that “early bilingualism often result[s] in perfect parallel proficiency”. Note: perfect, parallel, proficiency. I doubt it that the convenors’ choice of words was a simple tribute to alliteration. But I do wonder what these words mean, in isolation and in collocation, and I would love to know about the evidence supporting this statement.

My first publication explaining that perfect parallel translation equivalence proficiency can’t make multilingual sense also explained why. The data came from my own children, then only two of them, and then users of only Portuguese and Swedish. At the one-word stage, the children started using the “wrong” language with us, parents. Or rather, they started using the same language with both parents, in words like, for example, Swedish där (‘there’) or Portuguese dá (‘gimme’), and I wanted to know why.

On preliminary inspection, the observation was that “translation equivalents” of these words in their other language were way beyond babies’ articulatory abilities, e.g. Portuguese ali or Swedish får jag. I concluded that the children’s “vocal tracts were, at the time, not mature enough to pronounce the respective translations in each language, which are phonologically more elaborate.” Child speech doesn’t reflect adult articulatory sophistication.

On closer inspection, the children turned out to use different intonations with each of the words that they so “mixed”. In fact, they used different prosodies altogether with each parent, and they did so in their babbling. I understood their use of prosody as a means of differentiating between the otherwise very similar syllables/words that they were able to pronounce, like Swedish där or Portuguese dá. The children were signalling, through intonation, rhythm, and stress, that they were speaking different languages, and that they were doing so with the “right” parent. So I wondered: should we also look for “equivalents” of intonation across languages, as evidence of “perfect parallel proficiency”? Where can we find such equivalents? And if we can’t find them (we can’t), does this mean that multilingual children who do this (my children are not the only ones) are not multilingual after all, and are instead “confused”, because they’re using the “wrong/right” words with the “right/wrong” parent?

We may want to rethink what we mean when we talk about using “words”, and we may want to rethink what being multilingual means. It’s not the children’s fault that adult expectations shape the way we see and hear our little ones. My children were using both of their languages, and they were differentiating their use of both. Not by replicating adult uses of these languages, not in ways that adults believe languages “should” be used, and not in baby ways of doing adult things: they were doing baby things the baby way. If you’re keen to read a detailed account of (all three) children’s strategies to sort out their (three) languages, have a look in my book Three is a Crowd?

In contrast to many adults, small children do and say things that make sense. What they do and say teaches us about how we all learn, including how we learn to be multilingual, and teaches us how to give evidence of what we’ve learned: by using the means that are available to us. If, that is, we choose to *see* what’s going on, instead of attempting to fence in facts within the theory of the day.

OK, so untrained vocal tracts explain child mixes, and productions which don’t match uses of language in the children’s surroundings. Could this also be the case for adult language learners? My next post has something to say about this.

Cruz-Ferreira, M. (1990). Karin and Sofia in Bilingual-Land In J. Leather & A. James (Eds.), New Sounds 90. Proceedings of the 1990 Amsterdam Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech (pp. 248-254). Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press.

© MCF 2013

Next post: Shibboleths & Co. Saturday 6^th April 2013.

Glitches, false starts, and dead ends

Languages don’t come in ready-to-use packages. Their use is what makes them, because languages don’t exist without users. Languages are not “gifts”, either. Their acquisition takes time and commitment even when, as tiny infants, we don’t know we’re spending time or honouring commitments.

Language acquisition is a process, one which never ends, in fact. All of us are still learning all of our languages, because languages themselves are processes, as Wilhelm von Humboldt reminded us two centuries ago: Sie selbst [die Sprache] ist kein Werk (Ergon), sondern eine Thätigkeit (Energeia). We say that languages are “transmitted” from parent to child by force of habit, like we say that the sun “rises” and “sets”. Languages don’t (re)emerge unscathed by human interference across generations, for two reasons: they don’t have a life of their own, and we aren’t neutral conveyors of anything that we “pass on”.

We do end up using our languages like somebody else, for the simple reason that all of us, young or old, learn somebody else’s languages, from somebody else. But we do this our way. When we learn, we change, both ourselves and what we learned: just like there are no languages without users, there is no learning without learners. Our children don’t imitate us. If they did, they wouldn’t say gween for “green” or call every grown-up male in sight “daddy”, and our languages would be, today, exactly like they were ever since we started calling them “languages”. Child uses of language, whether monolingual or multilingual, don’t follow a script, because languages aren’t scripts.

Our children are not being “taught” our languages either, they are learning their own. Acquiring things means making them ours. When we acquire languages, we need to adapt to them and adapt them to us, whether our purpose is to ask to have a nappy changed, or provide a referee report for an academic paper. The interesting thing is that we can’t learn to do any of these things without, well, doing them. The trick is in the doing.

I like to think that we’re doing something new whenever we’re doing something. This is what fascinates me, for example, about the theatre and other live performances. I know there must have been rehearsals, I know there’s some kind of script, and I know the performers are trained professionals. But then, aren’t we all, when it comes to using our languages? I like to think that our uses of language are as unique as any other live performances – and I like to think that any glitches, false starts, and dead ends are part of the performance. The Roman “circenses” wouldn’t have had half the appeal they enjoyed if everyone knew exactly what was going to happen.

We may have been brainwashed into thinking that language acquisition in home environments is glitch-free, because we’ve been brainwashed into believing that “later” language acquisition is, by definition, glitch-full, but the facts are that any language acquisition will have glitches, false starts and dead ends. We say ser for estar in Portuguese, and tycka for tro in Swedish, or vice versa, and we say fink for think and think for sink in English, to mention but these acquisitional goodies in each of these languages. We speak like mummy when we might want to speak like daddy, or vice versa. We stutter and stammer, and fall silent in search of missing words or in bafflement at just-uttered bits and pieces of language that we suddenly realise we have no idea how to parse. We finish thoughts that we haven’t started, and we hit linguistic walls when we should be finishing the thoughts that we did start. And we do this most of the time.

Whoever believes that we all speak in what linguists call “words” and “sentences” has never bothered to listen to real-life speech (whoever believes that we *should* speak in words and sentences probably also believes that words and sentences are real-life beings). Glitches, false starts, and dead ends aren’t evidence of faulty language learning, they’re part of the learning process. They’re evidence that we’re using our new linguistic tools for what we need to say and do with them. Again, whether we’re young or old. Again, whether we’re monolingual or multilingual.

Next time, I’ll go back to small children, and to what they teach us about the way they learn.

© MCF 2013

Next post: Children speak child-speak. Saturday 23^rd March 2013.

“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.