Speaking Perfectly

In the comments to my most recent post, Delays in Multiple Languges Bernicy said:

sometimes I think we are going overboard with making our children speak perfectly. All these speech therapies for so many children just because they have a bit of problem saying some sentences or pronouncing some words. So what if the child isn’t speaking perfectly or doesn’t know the proper grammar? As long as the child gets his point across I think it is great. Afterall, many adults can’t speak properly either but that doesn’t mean they can’t make a good living or be productive; it just means they won’t be great public speakers. They can still communicate their meanings across one way or another and I think that’s good enough and important enough. The problem is that people do not communicate; not not speaking perfectly while trying to communicate.

“So what if a child isn’t speaking perfectly or doesn’t know the proper grammar?” The issue isn’t speaking perfectly, in fact far from it. This is not finishing school to polish off a diamond, it is making a round wheel out of a square one.

“The problem is that people do not communicate”. Imagine how frustrating when you DO communicate, and your mom doesn’t understand you half the time, your daycare workers understand you perhaps 10 percent of the time, and have to guess from your single word utterances exactly WHAT you are trying to say about that topic, and your grandparents and neighbors understand you none of the time. Imagine when you talk on the phone, your mom has to take the other line and translate everything you say, even when you are coming up on five years old and speaking the same language as the person you are trying to talk to.

Now imagine that you don’t pronounce half of every word, and leave out all verb tenses, possessives, articles etc. And then imagine how well you will do in school in the next couple of years. Sounding out letters in a word when you never say those sounds. Trying to write when you can’t speak a sentence. Trying to do show and tell in class, or participate in a discussion when you answer in single words and not sentences.

I’d rather catch up when it is still games and silliness to work on what he is severely behind on than when he is old enough to realize how much better the other kids speak at school, how behind he is in language skills and failing in his classes, teased by other kids. (and yes, it is learning delays, as he has had ample opportunity to hear and use the languages… 18 month olds speak more fluently than he does).

I agree that it is ridiculous to expect preschoolers to speak perfectly, to enunciate like eight year olds, to give speeches as though they were theatre majors. But I also think it is good parenting to be concerned when a child is a year or more behind in language skills and not catching up despite tons of stimulation. Language skills are the basis of all literacy and literacy is the basis of all schooling. I have done volunteer work with adults who lacked literacy and it is disheartening how handicapped they are in their personal, social and professional lives, often being confused by simple things like written rules at their child’s school or negotiating a lease, and being blocked from employment they would enjoy, stuck in manual dead end jobs.

It is easier to catch learning and developmental problems in toddlers and preschoolers than try to do remedial work when a child is school age, or worse, adult. They learn faster, they have less emotional baggage because of it, and fewer bad habits (ie it is harder to get a child to revise a word they have been saying badly for several years than it is to get that child to say a new word that has the same difficult sounds). And you are avoiding all the academic problems which will stem from it if you can deal with it pre school-entry. That gives me less than six months for Big Boy. And he will be going to school in French, not his stronger English, so he is confused by basic directions, negative sentences etc on TOP of his regular speech delays.

And frankly, when three separate speech therapists, none of whom have a financial stake in evaluating him as needing services since the child will be treated elsewhere, evaluate a child as severely delayed, it is sticking one’s head in the sand to think said child is “doing just fine”.

So, thanks for the lack of concern, but I would rather a congratulations for early diagnosis and actively seeking timely intervention.

Delays in multiple languages

Well, today I had the meeting with the francophone speech therapist re the evaluation she did with Big Boy last week. It was very interesting, in that it pretty much echoed the english language evaluation results he had a few weeks ago.

There were a few disparities: in French he misses conjugating verbs (in English there is very little of this: I sit, they sit, we sit, he sits), he is uncertain of his spacial indicators (on, under, beside, behind) which he knows very well in English, he has problems with the masculine and feminine (le chat, la personne, le bateau, la maison) but again we don’t have that in English. He has difficulty with multiple requests: “pick up the blue car then the red bus” “put the car in the box and take out the dolly” whereas in English he is pretty good with that.

I think most of those have to do with French being the third language in his life (second most fluent now but still he learned Mandarin as a baby, then English after 2 yrs old, and finally French), so these are learning a foreign language issues he needs to catch up on. It is true that he should be learning the masculine and feminine articles together with the nouns when he hears them daily at daycare… so maybe that is some indication of delay. She also said he speaks French with an English accent. That is so funny… I am often surprised by how “french” his french utterances sound, but then I am an … anglophone!

As for the rest, it mirrored pretty much exactly his English evaluation, which goes to show that if a child has a learning difficulty in one language, he’ll have them across the board if multilingual, and if no difficulties in one language, will not encounter more by becoming multilingual (there are no higher statistics of language difficulties among bilingual or multilinguals than monolinguals).

He takes shortcuts with words, often dropping the end consonants of a word, ie woh instead of word. He often doesn’t pronounce an R: nawwow instead of narrow, fi-man instead of fireman. He often mispronounces N as M: I don’t know: I dummo. I don’t have any: I don have ammy. He uses just the key words in a sentence or concept: “Big Boy Mommy go gramma house”= Mommy and I will go to Grandma’s house. “I play ball next time park”= “I want to play ball the next time we go to the park”.

He has problems with pronouns, both not using personal pronouns like “I” and “you” and mixing up when to use “he/she” “him/her”. He has problems accessing his vocabulary when he wants to say something, or tell a story. ie knows the words “blue” “car” “beside” “house” and will say “look that thing there!” which under protracted questioning means “look a the blue car beside the house!” (it can be VERY long to figure out what “that” “there” is from everything in view!).

So, a severe delay in morph-syntax and slight delay in phonology (is that right?). She thinks he has difficulty organizing his mouth and tongue to make the sounds he wants, and so drops off anything difficult, such as double consonants: ie spoon comes out as poon, and if you enunciate the S to have him notice: SSSpoon, he will say soon instead, dropping the P instead of the S.

So, it was super interesting to see her write the exact same conclusions and observations in his “2nd” language as in the first!

She did give me a large list of “interventions” to do. Lots of them games (like picking images out in magazines and saying “the lady, SHE’s driving a car” “the boy, HE’s playing ball”. Some to do with his mouth: ie putting lipstick on one lip and have him spread it to the other lip by moving his lips around. Playing games trying to touch your tongue to your nose, your chin, left side, right side etc. I haven’t read all the papers yet, but it is wonderful to have real, concrete suggestions we can do in daily life or at his daycare.

I did give a copy to the daycare, and am waiting for the written evaluation to give to them as well. It is wonderful that they are willing to do things like this with him. And they are also so wonderful to have followed up on subsidized speech therapy (the govt has a program for “handicapped kids in daycare”)… they have managed to find an intern at a speech therapy clinic who is finishing her masters, who will come in once a week for an hour from end of April until end of August! That is amazing! And having seen the billing breakdown, I am so thankful. It is hundreds and hundreds of dollars every month. But hopefully this will help bring his speaking and french comprehension up to a level where he will be able to participate fully when he starts at 4yrold preschool in September.

The speech therapist DID say to do the exercises in French at daycare and English at home (because they are native French speakers at daycare), but she didn’t insist too much. (I didn’t tell her I do French at home too). And she was VERY clear that problems he has are NOT due to multilingualism, and that I am doing a great job stimulating language with him already. That was great to hear.

So, I’ll write more about it when I have had a chance to read through all the papers she gave me, and put some of the suggestions to use.

So far we only did one game, where we used the cards in our Kingka game: we pulled out two at a time, taking turns and had to say “It’s a….” (it’s a car, it’s a horse, it’s a flower) which also gave us an opportunity to work on exceptions: “it’s water” “it’s some wood” “it’s FEET” (instead of it’s two foot) The goal is to get him to say whole sentences, not just “car!” “horse!” “flower”! “water!” And surprisingly he loved it. And liked it so much, he “it’s a….” every card as he put them back in the bag!

So here’s to working on his speech while waiting on our “12 month waiting list” we’ve been on for professional intervention since Sept 2009!!

Language delays and Bilingualism

I discovered this very interesting site for Speech Pathologists, about language delays and bilingualism.

They differentiate between children who learn two languages at the same time, for instance, a child who has two parents speaking two languages within the home, or who is hearing a minority language at home, and a dominant language in the culture outside the home daily, and children who learn languages sequentially. For instance a child who speaks English at home and in the rest of her environment, and then starts taking French classes after the English is already well established. Or a child who grows up in a Spanish speaking country and then moves to an English speaking country.

There is also differentiation between additive bilingualism: ie a child knows a language and adds on a second one so that the child speaks/understands both languages, and subtractive bilingualism: ie a child speaks and understands Chinese in her native land and then is adopted into Quebec, and as she learns French, she loses her Chinese skills. Or a child whose early environment is a minority language at home with her family, and then who integrates into the school system and surrounding peer culture, and loses the minority language either through attrition or choice.

I found the page looking for benefits of bilingualism for a friend, and indeed in this article there are a lot of mythbusting statements for non-language-delayed children. But also a lot of information I found pertinent to Big Boy who is experiencing delays in morpho-syntax (sentence structure and grammar). We had another speech evaluation today, in French instead of English, which was quite fascinating. Many times he needed to have instructions repeated several times as it was evident he was only hearing part of the sentence, ie deciding before listening to the complete sentence, or not noticing a negative: "Quelle fille n'est pas capable de toucher les livres?" and he would point to the girl who was obviously capable of reaching the books on the high shelf (not the girl who was reaching but couldn't touch them, nor the girl who was reading books in a chair). The evaluator said that his language comprehension was not as high in French as in English, but that was to be expected.

There were some similarities, such as not being consistent in using masculine and feminine pronouns, not conjugating verbs (there is more of that in French, where verbs change for most pronouns, but there is still some in English: I go, he goes, I do, we do, they do, he does), little past and future tenses. He tends to stick with one tense (present) and then add in time signifiers: I do that yesterday. I do that tomorrow.

Fascinatingly Chinese grammar is correct this way. The verbs are immutable and it is other little words before or after the main verb as well as time signifiers which indicate past or future: I do the dishes. I am do the dishes now. I did do the dishes yesterday. I will do the dishes tomorrow. Compare with I am doing the dishes now, I did the dishes. In English we have a bit more choice to use a past tense "I went" or adding a word to the verb: "I did go". Now if only I could say that Big Boy speaks fluent chinese and that is where he gets the lack of verb conjugasion from, but I fear not! His Chinese is the worst of his three languages.

Anyways some interesting statements from this article:

1. Does bilingualism cause language delays in children?

The short answer is no. However, this question deserves further analysis.

Vocabulary, syntactic and narrative development
Studies that have assessed bilingual children’s expressive and receptive vocabulary development by comparing combined vocabulary in L1 and L2 with the vocabularies of monolingual children found no differences between the two groups (Pearson, Fernández, Lewedeg, & Oller, 1997). Similar results were found when comparing the syntactic acquisition of young bilingual children in each language with that of monolinguals (Paradis & Genesse, 1996).

This is particularly interesting since it is directly pertinent to our situation, living in French Canada, where the dominant language in the streets is French, but the second language, English, is a high status language. ie neither language is in a risk of the child refusing it as being unimportant (unlike speaking Chinese here):

2. Are children with language and cognitive delays capable of learning two languages?

A major concern for parents of a child with language impairment is whether the addition of a second language will further delay language development and learning. Kohnert et al. (2005) state that the current belief that bilingualism is disadvantageous to children with language impairment (as compared to children with language impairment who are monolingual) is false. Because many professionals believe that the input of the second language places additional demands on a language-learning system that is already deficient, they recommend to parents that they confine their input to one language. While this approach may be well-intentioned, it can result in a child being isolated in a bilingual home in which family members communicate in a language the child cannot share. In addition, it has led to professionals failing to support the child’s home language (Thordardottir, 2002).

Studies suggest that exposing a language-delayed minority child to a second language does not negatively affect development. A study by Paraidis, Crago, Genesee & Rice (2003) found that seven year old Canadian children, who were language impaired and were exposed consistently to both French and English from birth, did not perform worse than their monolingual peers with language impairment on analyses of spontaneous language samples. It is important to note that children in this study experienced simultaneous acquisition of the two languages and that both languages had high status in the community, making the social context for bilingualism “additive” rather than “subtractive” (Lambert, 1975).

Another study compared the language abilities of children with Down syndrome being raised in bilingual homes with monolingual children with Down syndrome and found no evidence of a negative effect of the bilingualism (Kay-Raining Bird, Cleave, Trudeau, Thordardottir, Sutton & Thorpe, 2005). In this case, bilingualism was defined as “intensive, ongoing and prolonged exposure to two languages” (p. 195), one of which was English. Most of the bilingual children had French as their second language. All children had been exposed to a second language for at least 32 months (mean age was 82 months). On the English tests administered, the bilingual children scored at least as well as their monolingual counterparts.

These studies are significant in that they demonstrate that children with language impairment are capable of learning two languages at least as well as their monolingual, language-impaired peers. Therefore, professionals can reassure parents that they need not be concerned about the impact of a second language on their child with language impairment.

There is also an interesting section on whether language skills learned in one language can be transfered to another. Apparently some can, if they are pertinent, ie masculine and feminine nouns in romance languages (French, Spanish, italian), but not if they are NOT pertinent (gendered nouns in French, but not in English. Verb conjugaisons in French but not in Chinese). This is interesting from a speech therapy point of view for Big Boy. Will speech therapy in French benefit him if he is lacking apostrophe S possessives in English? Unlikely. But it is likely to help with all those little filler words in French, and maybe English too. He is so likely to say “Car” instead of “it’s a car”… comprehensible but not full sentences.

There is also a section on the role of the speech therapist in valorising the home language. That would be especially pertinent in cases where a minority language is spoken at home which is not sustained in school or the outside world. I am still in a quandry what to do about the advice of speech therapists who suggest that I should ONLY speak English with Big Boy as it is the language I am most comfortable with, have the best grammar, richest vocabulary and use (idioms, metaphors etc).

Since French is spoken in the broader society here, I function in French both within the home in my home office (with clients), within the home with francophone friends (including Big Boy’s little friends who are French), outside the home with neighbors and friends, and in public dealing with all service personnel, whether cashiers, waiters, mailman, daycare workers etc… It would be exceedingly artificial for me to be speaking English only with Big Boy in these situations. And indeed be alienating to those we interact with who may be monolingual francophone.

Indeed I wish to model for him the correct FRENCH behaviour in requesting aid, addressing friends and neighbors, completing transactions in shops etc. And given that French is mandated by law here as the language of businesses, education etc, and given that French is an endangered language in the country and continent, there is a lot of social and political negative weight to speaking English in public, or with francophones, and for modelling this “outside-Quebec-majority-language” with my small son. There is something intrinsically VERY different from insisting on speaking Tagalog for instance, with my child while at home and in public, to insist on it against the onslaught of the majority language, and insisting on speaking English, the “taking-over-the-world default colonial” language.

So, I take with a grain of salt the recommendations of the speech therapist today, to speak only English with Big Boy, and leave the FRench 100% to the daycare to nourish with him. I will continue to read books in English and French (and Chinese as much as he will allow me), to encourage him to watch French dvds within the home, and to give him French vocabulary as we navigate in public, with friends and on the way to daycare. I find it is so important as we go to daycare, that on the way I discuss with him the highlights of the previous day, new toy acquisitions, anticipated travels etc, IN FRENCH. So that upon arrival, he will not have this abrupt transition to another language, and be lost if they ask him to say “what did you do yesterday? What’s up with you?”

I want him to have the words to say “J’ai été voir les papillons au jardin botanique” or “J’irai voir grandmama à Vancouver. J’irais en mois de juin avec maman en avion” or “J’ai réçu un nouveau jouet, une voiture de police, hier”, and not just be stuck with only English words and thoughts when they ask him in French.

So, we’ll see how it goes. Anyways, I recommend the article at hanen.org whether you have a monolingual child and are thinking of second language classes, whether you are in a bilingual environment with a speech-delayed child, or whether you speak a minority language at home.

ps, thanks so much to everyone who left a comment on my “flabbergasted” post! I still am amazed at 1400 comments on a blog entry about what a pioneer mom wears out on a date with her hubby! LOL!