Language Disabilities in Cultural and Linguistic Diversity

By Deirdre Martin

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2009 Deirdre Martin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84769-159-0

Contents

Acknowledgements, xiii,
Introduction, xv,
Chapter 1 A Sociocultural Activity Approach: Key Concepts, 1,
Chapter 2 Provision for Communication Disabilities in Cultural and Linguistic Diversity, 21,
Chapter 3 Disability and Disabling Cultural and Linguistic Diversity, 43,
Chapter 4 Bilingual Speech and Language Development and Difficulties, 66,
Chapter 5 Literacy, Biliteracies and Difficulties with Printed Language, 89,
Chapter 6 Deafness in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Communities, 119,
Chapter 7 Assessment Approaches: Comparison, Product and Process, 147,
Chapter 8 Learning, Teaching and Intervention, 175,
Chapter 9 Collaboration as Interprofessional Learning, 202,
Chapter 10 Parents, Families and Children Working with Professionals, 231,
References, 255,

CHAPTER 1

A Sociocultural Activity Approach: Key Concepts

Introduction

This chapter presents the theoretical approach and key concepts used in further chapters to interpret research and practice with language-related disabilities and cultural and linguistic diversity (CLD). The dominant approach to understanding language disabilities is through linguistic, cognitive and psycholinguistic avenues of research and practice. While sociocultural and historical issues are always considered in practice with children and families with language disabilities, the importance of conceptualising this dimension is underscored in contexts of CLD. This chapter sets out a Vygotskian approach to understanding language difficulties in CLD contexts, and draws together linguistic, cognitive and psycholinguistic perspectives with sociocultural constructs. The chapter weaves these approaches across three sections. The first section examines relationships between reality and knowledge, in order to draw attention to the importance of self-consciousness and reflexion in contexts of diversity and difference between researcher/ researched and practitioner/client. The second section looks specifically at models used to represent language development and disability, and the third section presents key concepts of a Vygotskian perspective concerning language and learning.

Knowledge and Representations

In this section, I discuss representations of language, language disability and diversity in the research literature. Relationships between reality and the representation of reality underpin our understanding of the world and the assumptions we bring to considering language learning, language disabilities and diversity. The conceptual power of theories and models informs different discourses and practices for language-related learning needs, and examining discourse and practice gives a window onto our construction of knowledge. With reference to language disability and diversity, models recruited to inform research and practice are constructions of understanding built up from social, cultural and historical traditions.

Wartofsky's (1979: xv) thoughts offer an important perspective:

we create cognitive artifacts which not only go beyond the biological evolved and genetically inherited modes of perceptual and cognitive activity but which radically alter the very nature of learning ... The cognitive artifacts we create are models: representations to ourselves of what we do, of what we want, and of what we hope for. The model is, therefore, not simply a reflection or a copy of some state of affairs, but beyond this, a putative mode of action, a representation of prospective practice, or of acquired modes of action ... The model is taken to be a construction in which we organize symbols of our experience or of our thought in such a way that we effect a systematic representation of this experience or thought as a means of understanding it, or of explaining it to others.

Wartofsky argues here that we use our cognitive capacities to create new tools for thinking. These cognitive tools, models, do not reflect back to us our lived reality. Rather, they act on our experiences by abstracting them into symbolic signs and organising them into systems so that they re-present our lived reality for us and are a way of making sense of it to ourselves and to others. In this way, a distinction is maintained between the model and what it is a model of. I draw on this approach as a conceptual tool to discuss some of the powerful conceptual models that shape construction and use of knowledge by researchers and practitioners and by learners with language-related disabilities and their bilingual parents and families.

A powerful tool for organising our experiences is language. We use it internally to organise lived experiences in order to make sense of them alongside the other knowledge we have. We use language to organise what is external and social, in order to make meaning and create shared cognitions with others of what we perceive. Collective language practices are referred to as discourses, which transform issues, experiences and our reality into discursive objects that contribute to our conceptualisation of them. Talk and discourses are tools to organise problems and conceptualise knowledge. We distinguish lived reality from the representation by using cognitive tools for organising experience. Models of experience are built from nonlinguistic symbols, such as gestures, mathematics, pictures, as well as linguistic artefacts of discourse. Wartofsky argues that representing and making representations is something we do, rather than being in the nature of the represented/ representation. Furthermore, it is a reflexive activity:

the active role which representation and the use of models plays in shaping our perception and cognition, and in serving as a heuristic guide to our theoretical or practical activity ... it is suggested that ... our perceptual and cognitive understanding of the world is in large part shaped and changed by the representational artifacts we ourselves create. We are in effect the products of our own activity, in this way: we transform our own perceptual and cognitive modes, our ways of seeing and of understanding, by means of the representations we make. (Wartofsky, 1979: xxiii)

This quote is important because it emphasises the reflexive relationship between reality and the constructs we use to interpret and enact reality. The representations and metaphors we use to talk about reality become our perceived reality. Thus, shared ways of talking and discourses of texts and policies about CLD and disability, particularly language-related disabilities, are the artefacts we use to shape practices with people who are culturally and linguistically diverse with language disabilities. A salient example is the different representations of knowledge held by researchers, professional groups and parents concerning two groups of bilingual children: those with language-learning difficulties in both their languages and those with difficulties learning a second language having successfully learnt their first. The cognitions that we have about each group of children take professionals, parents and researchers on different trajectories of thinking and behaving with these children in their practices and in research. The relationship between practice traditions and learning is revisited later in the chapter.

Metaphors of Language Development and Disability

Theories, models and metaphors are...