Assessment of communication abilities in multilingual children: Language rights or human rights?

Abstract

Communication involves a sender, a receiver and a shared code operating through shared rules. Breach of communication results from disruption to any of these basic components of a communicative chain, although assessment of communication abilities typically focuses on senders/receivers, on two assumptions: first, that their command of features and rules of the language in question (the code), such as sounds, words or word order, as described in linguists’ theorisations, represents the full scope of linguistic competence; and second, that languages are stable, homogeneous entities, unaffected by their users’ communicative needs. Bypassing the role of the code in successful communication assigns decisive rights to abstract languages rather than to real-life language users, routinely leading to suspected or diagnosed speech-language disorder in academic and clinical assessment of multilingual children’s communicative skills. This commentary reflects on whether code-driven assessment practices comply with the spirit of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Keywords:

• Article 19
• assessment
• child multilingualism
• communication
• United Nations
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Communication and the human right to communicate

A basic communication chain involves a sender, a receiver and a code. Sender and receiver code and decode a message, respectively, using a code which consists of largely arbitrary symbols and conventional rules representing meanings. Ideally, the meaning of sent and received messages will match, as is assumed in everyday communicative events. In practice, however, the receiver’s interpretation of a message may deviate from the sender’s intended meaning, and both may differ from a presumed factual content of the message, as highlighted in the founding literature on Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969). Successful communication nevertheless relies on one condition: sender and receiver must share a code and the rules enabling its operation. This condition extends to appropriate assessment of communication ability, which necessarily involves a code. Celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affords a timely opportunity to investigate whether academic and clinical assessment of multilingual children’s communicative abilities abides by this condition, as expressed in its Article 19 (United Nations, 1948).

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights explicitly considers the three components of a communication chain, stating the right to “receive and impart” messages by means of “any media”. The latter formulation acknowledges the multimodality of human communication (Rymes, 2013), which draws on simultaneous and integrated use of distinct codes involving different senses, principally hearing and sight. Spoken communication is commonly assigned primacy, by defining other modes as alternative. Augmentative and alternative communication, for example, is taken to include “all forms of communication (other than oral speech)” (ASHA, 2017a). This primacy explains why sound-mediated codes are simply called languages, without modifiers like sign, gestural or body that, in contrast, regularly qualify other communicative modes. It is important to bear in mind, however, that auditory and visual clues interact in complementary rather than alternative ways in everyday spoken communication, as Melo-Pfeifer (2017) reports for multilingual children, impacting assessment of communicative abilities.

The phrase “any media” in Article 19 further endorses the right to choose the code(s); that is, the language(s) in which the “right to freedom of opinion and expression” can be exercised “without interference” (Article 19). For multilinguals, this means that one language, rather than another, may best suit a particular communicative exchange, since the different languages of a multilingual serve different purposes. The preferred language may or may not match the national languages in use where multilingual children are being assessed, although assessments of communicative abilities regularly target those languages, which are also the ones in which most schooling takes place (MacSwan & Rolstad, 2006; Wright, 2007). In healthcare provision, the issue of language barriers further arises in communication from and to children and their caregivers, which takes place in the clinic itself, and up the often intricate bureaucratic path that leads to it, including dealing with each party’s cultural beliefs about disorder and health (Cruz-Ferreira, 2013). This requires a specific register which, like all specialised uses of language, may also challenge monolinguals in monolingual settings, although the evidence shows significant rates of worse care for those with limited proficiency in mainstream languages (Jacobs & Diamond, 2017). Article 19’s “right to freedom of opinion and expression” is core to healthcare, but the right to invoke it founders on the vicious circle that requires complaints about language services to be filed in the official language(s) of the provider country.

Mandatory use of national or official languages in many speech-language pathology clinics around the world (Jacobs & Diamond, 2017) thwarts not only the rights of clients to linguistic freedom, but also those of speech-language pathologists: in a review of policies detailing access to healthcare language services in the US, Canfield and Diamond (2017, p. 103) report that regulations fail to include “any specific guidance on when clinicians can appropriately use their non-English language skills”. The rights expressed in Article 19 hold “regardless of frontiers”, where reference to national borders is unsurprising in a document originating from the United Nations. Nowhere, however, does Article 19 promote the use of national languages. It bears then to reflect on how official decisions about language use within national frontiers relate to multilingualism.

Multilingualism, national languages and shared languages

The term multilingualism can be ambiguous, designating both locations (e.g. countries) and individuals (e.g. teachers) that use more than one language. The language education policy of the Council of Europe (2014) proposes a terminological distinction between the two meanings, recommending multilingualism for locations and plurilingualism for individuals, but the issue is that only people can use languages, as argued in Cruz-Ferreira (2010), except by metaphorical extension of the word use. In what follows, multi-prefixed words therefore refer to individual multilingualism.

Metaphorical uses of the term multilingualism generate confusion between individual and national linguistic rights. International agreements implicitly identify individual rights with national rights, rather than the converse, as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights statement that a person “belongs” to a nation (Article 2). In a juridical analysis of multilingual rights in two European Union (EU) protocols, namely, the European Convention on Human Rights, from 1950, and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, from 2000, Platon (2016) likewise notes that references to languages relate to protection of member states, guaranteeing their national identities and their right to preserve their official language [sic, in the singular] within the Union, rather than to genuine individual linguistic rights, which member states often challenge.

Nations and national languages are both rather recent constructs (Bonfiglio, 2010). Evidence of their close historical links lies in that many official languages bear the same name as a nationality, although the concepts of languages and nations are clearly not coextensive. Ethnologue (Simons & Fennig, 2017) estimates the number of countries at around 200 against around 7000 languages, adding that the number of languages “is constantly in flux [because] the languages themselves are in flux”. Language fluidity explains why there is no linguistic or geographic definition of what a language is: the borders delimiting languages and nations are political, as are the reasons that created the need to name those concepts. Naming, as Wittgenstein (1953) observed, is often enough to create the illusion of real referents for words that gain recognition in dictionaries and in common use.

National languages represent an added layer of abstraction to the concept of languages, mooting the question of whether a country’s national does, should or must speak that country’s national language(s). The preferred assignment of people to a single nation, as in Articles 2 (“the country or territory”) and 15 (“a nationality”) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in turn moots this question for multiple nationalities. Official adoption of a language as national is an administrative decision, ostensibly meant to unify the management of a country via a limited number of shared lingua francas. These shared languages are not selected from among national uses, being instead legislated top-down to match those of the nation’s political rulers (Wright, 2007). More accurately, a national language matches its legislators’ language variety (technically, a dialect), since human beings speak dialects, not languages, as the Council of Europe (2014) rightly acknowledges.

National varieties of a language accrue prestige from their promotion and preservation as the standard. They traditionally associate with good, correct uses (Longmore, 2007), being (mis)characterised as devoid of features that negatively affect non-standard dialects, as in the complimentary interpretation of someone’s speech as having “no accent”. Where assessment instruments make use of standard varieties, it is therefore important to decouple factual uses of language from judgemental expectations about them.

Academic and clinical assessment of multilingual children

As Fulcher (2015) discusses, normed references for assessment of linguistic skills are standardised from uses of specific populations, making them relative to the time and place of data collection, rather than absolute. Norming decisions typically favour monolingual varieties that are also prevalent in national institutions where proficiency tests take place, entailing that norm-referenced benchmarks can only reliably predict disorder among those sharing the monolingual code from and for which they were normed.

Assessment of children’s communicative abilities begins in school, for academic purposes. Instruments routinely draw on mainstream standards and multilingual children routinely underperform. Their scores raise concerns about linguistic health, with two consequences: misguided recommendations for educational segregation of multilingual children, against evidence that mainstream schooling favours their academic achievement (Rios-Aguilar, González Canché, & Sabetghadam, 2012); and disproportionate school referral of multilingual children to speech-language pathology clinics (MacSwan & Rolstad, 2006). Similarly standardised clinical assessment instruments then confirm those concerns, initiating intervention processes for typically developing multilingual children. Research has gone a long way to dispel misconceptions equating multilingualism with disorder or a “special” condition, precisely by underscoring the unsuitable extrapolation of monolingual test standards to multilingual populations (Goldstein, 2012; Kohnert & Windsor, 2004; Peña, 2007; Thordardottir, 2010). The questions are, then, why do those tests endure and what is it that they are finding.

Two assumptions govern academic and clinical assessment of multilingual children. First, that language competence exhausts itself in mastery of the sets of modular components and rules through which linguists describe languages, such as sounds, words or word order. Not only do those sets vary widely depending on schools of linguistic thought, but communicative proficiency hinges on pragmatic and multimodal competence as well. Second, that languages exist independently of their users, who are passive conveyors of linguistic content: languages remain stable and unaffected across uses, leading to the belief that the variety represented in assessment tools also fairly represents the language from which it was sampled. With few exceptions concerning major world languages, ability tests bear the name of a language, not of the normed variety, reinforcing the mistaking of labels (a language name) for linguistic facts (the variety in question).

Conceiving languages as self-contained, homogeneous entities sanctions the assessment of language ability through any single language. This misrepresents multilingualism as multi-monolingualism, disregarding the differential use that multilinguals make of their languages according to communicative needs and environments. It also contravenes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by depriving multilingual children of their right to “any media” of communication (Article 19), and by ignoring its concluding safeguard against “any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein” (Article 30). Poor proficiency in the only language of monolinguals may be a reliable indicator of language disorder, but linguistic assessment targets language ability, not ability in particular languages (see Cruz-Ferreira, 2011, for a review). In multilinguals, language disorder presents in all their languages, which is why assessment must account for full linguistic repertoires, one language for monolinguals, more than one for multilinguals.

Code-driven assessments assume the normed variety as a shared code, leaving its role in a communicative chain unquestioned. This turns the essence of communication on its head, by forcing senders/receivers to serve unfamiliar, institutional codes. The rights of abstract languages override those of real-life language users, who are held responsible for communication breakdown.

Safeguarding multilingual children’s communicative rights

Translating the natural variability of human communication into practices that respect it is a human right. Defeatist stances towards the implementation of this right typically misconceive multilingualism as too complex and diverse (as if monolingualism were simple and uniform), or as requiring that institutional staff be conversant with all the languages in question (as if this were a sensible demand). Constructive stances argue instead for empowering staff and clients to exercise their rights to provide and receive service, respectively. Practical, usable ways of achieving this goal are proposed in Mourão and Lourenço (2015) for school settings, and in McLeod, Verdon and International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech (2017) for clinical settings. Unawareness of what multilingualism is also breeds reluctance to invest in human and technological support services. Trained interpreters, videoconferencing and training in how to access and use them, among others, are needed to streamline cross-linguistic communication (ASHA, 2017b; Jacobs & Diamond, 2017). Such services not only assist the right to choose a preferred code, they also avoid the waste of time and resources caused by deficient communication.

Safeguarding children’s communicative rights goes beyond multilingualism, in that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stands for human rights. Gumperz (1964) unified as “verbal repertoires” his insight that the codes representing monolingual language varieties are as distinct as different languages: “The verbal repertoire […] contains all the accepted ways of formulating messages” (pp. 137-138), echoing Article 19’s “any means” of communication. And he adds: “The concept of the verbal repertoire allows us to deal with speech communities of all types, [m]onolingual and multilingual” (p. 141), because “a verbal repertoire is definable both in linguistic and social terms. As a linguistic entity it bridges the gap between grammatical systems and human groups” (p. 151). Bridging gaps by means of codified systems enabling individuals to “seek […] information and ideas” (Article 19) is the purpose of communication. Ensuring that children can exercise their right to communicate, through any means available to them as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, remains with those who can speak for them.

Declaration of interest

There are no real or potential conflicts of interest related to the manuscript.

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge the contribution of two anonymous reviewers to the final version of this article.