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 important cognitive devices to support human thinking as well as being shared conceptual tools to support communal thinking (Mercer, 2000: 173). I present three metaphors of learning language in contexts of disability and diversity with an emphasis on learning, and argue that sociocultural metaphors offer a best fit for the realities of language disabilities and diversity. Two metaphors are frequently used to describe learning and particularly language learning: acquisition and participation, and a more recent third metaphor is co-construction (Sfard, 1998; Donato, 2000; Hager, 2004).

Metaphors are used as tools for conceptual development by describing a subject in terms of another subject, so that our understanding is enhanced. Characteristics of the first subject are transposed to the second; often a concrete object or experience is used to relate to something abstract or conceptual. While conceptual understanding is enhanced in one way, it is also limited by the concrete dimensions and orientations of the metaphor. Hence, there is a dynamic in (re)searches for further metaphors that are a better fit for the characteristics of the abstract or conceptual reality. For example, the ‘bucket theory’ (Crystal, 1987) was recruited to explain language development and disability, and drew on the familiar metaphor of mind: a container with hierarchic levels and input. While this metaphor captured some salient characteristics of language development and disability, it could not capture the complexity of dynamic disability across language levels.

A model of limited linguistic processing which is based on a notion of hierarchy is premature. Rather, a simpler model, referred to here as the “bucket” model, in which the different levels exercise mutual influence without priorities, is more appropriate in our present state of knowledge. (Crystal, 1987: 7)

For similar reasons, the container metaphor of language for bilingual development was abandoned. While it could represent the characteristic of two developing language codes, it could not represent the socio-linguistic complexities of bilingualism evident in reality, such as codeswitching. Crystal notes that the usefulness of metaphors is intimately related to our current understanding of reality. Metaphors for conceptual understanding are evident in research paradigms as well as in professional practices and policies. I discuss three metaphors for learning, specifically applied to language.

The acquisition metaphor is often used to explain the maturation of a biological predisposition of language. This nativist position is put by Pinker (1994: 8):

I prefer the admittedly quaint term instinct”. It conveys the idea that people know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs. Web-spinning was not invented … spiders spin webs because they have spider brains which give them the urge to spin and the competence to succeed.

The acquisition metaphor foregrounds language, the assumption of a given source of language knowledge, often Universal Grammar, rather than learning. The acquisition metaphor represents language such that 4 Language Disabilities in Cultural and Linguistic Diversity ‘heads come fully loaded’ and only need minimal triggering from the environment to grow to their full functionality (van Lier, 2000: 259).

Metaphors of acquisition and language instinct capture nonconscious, tacit learning characteristics of first language development. It is a highly influential model of language development that shapes research paradigms in the field, with its emphasis on down-playing the impact of environment, and using (quasi) experimental paradigms, comparing ‘real’ talk with ‘ideal’ targets. It is most frequently associated with development as ‘product’, demonstrated in practices such as measuring language development by acquired items of language, in decontextualised scenarios. The acquisition metaphor is used to explain developmental difficulties in speech, language and communication due to a genetic predisposition. It supports a large body of empirical research focused on specific difficulties with language structure (see Chapter 4).

The acquisition metaphor also represents the language information-processing model. This model emphasises the powerful cognitive strategies involved in language development, and is highly influential in the field of speech and language development and disabilities. Metaphors for information processing are closely linked to historical developments in related areas of knowledge. The model emerged in the 1970s when widespread use of computers for problem solving and storing information led some psychologists to use computer processing as a representation of processing in the human mind. Cognitive processing models have provided powerful cognitive artefacts and heuristic devices for understanding processing and the breakdown in processing of speech and language information (e.g. Fodor, 1983; Dockrell & McShane, 1993; Stackhouse & Wells, 1997). Models have been developed to offer insights on structural hierarchic development, which embrace bilingual and additional language development (Pienemann, 2005, see Chapter 4). The metaphors in this perspective conceptualise speech and language knowledge in terms of internal representations stored in memory to be accessed, retrieved and manipulated. It, too, constructs learning as ‘product’ and draws on the container metaphor of mind-as-filing-cabinet, where new learning of content can be added, in an atomised, sequential way (Middleton & Brown, 2005). These conceptual tools have shaped research and practice by informing diagnostic practices, programmes of intervention and decisions about educational provision.

However, the acquisition metaphor of language development offers little insight for the purposes of culturally and linguistically diverse children with language disability. It is limited in its representation both of development through explicit teaching/learning and intervention, and of the effect of cultural practices and diverse language environments on language development and disability. The language instinct metaphor relies on an underspecified source of language knowledge for first language development and is unable to offer a source for additional language development. Cognitive approaches explain language learning and additional language learning through strategies. Cognitive models often use the mechanistic metaphor of ‘input’/’output’ to describe language development and teaching learning. Yet, this metaphor is unable to capture the complexity of dialogic and negotiated practice that is common in developmental and teaching-learning scenarios, either formally in class, or informally between parent and child or between peers. Nor does it capture concepts of language learning in contexts of CLD.

A consequence of the dominance and limitations of the acquisition metaphor in research on speech and language difficulties is that intervention is a relatively undertheorised and under-researched area. A similar pattern was evident in early second language acquisition (SLA) research, but teaching-learning in SLA and bilingual language development has become more researched in studies that draw on sociocultural approaches to language learning. Researchers (see Lantolf, 2000) working in a sociocultural approach, explore, in particular, multilingual learning in culturally diverse contexts around the activity of collective meaning making and sense making in children.

There are implications of the acquisition metaphor for policy and practice with language learning and language-related disability for children from culturally and linguistically diverse homes. The nativist model of the acquisition metaphor dominates research, which emphasises speed and ease of language acquisition and places little emphasis on language environments for language learning. While the cognitive model represents becoming bilingual as making increased demands on language knowledge and processing knowledge and thus more complex within-the-head processing. This approach may inform (mis)advice about simplifying ‘input’ to one language. Yet, it is evident that children across the gamut of ability can and do become bilingual. This real-life situation is a strong driver to consider other metaphors that represent more accurately language learning in disability and diversity.

The participation metaphor is frequently used to represent language learning as participating in practice, discourse and activity. Language development and learning is a process of change for the learner and their environment. Learning is situated, contextualised and influenced by cultural, historical and social factors. A metaphor for this understanding of learning is ‘the gradually clearing of a fog in a landscape’, indicating 6 Language Disabilities in Cultural and Linguistic Diversity the gradual growth of understanding, rather than an all-or-nothing ‘across-the-board’ learning event represented in the acquisition metaphor (Hager, 2004: 8). To construct a rounded understanding of language growth, it may be unwise to adopt one metaphor over the other. The social is not absent in the acquisition metaphor and acquisition in the form of internalised social practices and conversation is not absent from the participation metaphor (Donato, 2000: 40). The participation metaphor has informed research and practice with bilingual language development and second/additional language learning, while its implications for informing conceptualising research and assessment practices, intervention and pedagogy with language disability are only beginning to be explored.

A more recent third metaphor is also used for learning and language learning: construction (Hager, 2004) and specifically transformative through co-construction (Wells, 1999). It contrasts with the acquisition metaphor by refuting assumptions that abilities and learning emerge independently from their historical and cultural settings. Co-construction captures the individual’s engagement with the social context as well as the gradual building of knowledge and understanding, and is discussed next, through a Vygotskian perspective. All three metaphors are referred to in discussion of literature in subsequent chapters.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Language Disabilities in Cultural and Linguistic Diversity by Deirdre Martin. Copyright © 2009 Deirdre Martin. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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