Implicit Bias Topic: Language

Transcript for Podcast Lesson on Language with Dr. Pena

Jenny Woo: I'm excited to be sitting next to Dr. Elizabeth Pena today and we're going to talk about the topic of implicit bias. Elizabeth Pena is a professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine. She's a certified Speech Language Pathologist and is a Fellow of the American Speech Language Hearing Association. She focuses on how children from diverse linguistic backgrounds learn new language skills and the language impairment that might happen in those children. Her research also focuses on the development and evaluation of test assessments that accurately provide insights on language impairments vs. language differences. Welcome! Why don't we get started with a card on the topic of implicit bias on the 52 Essential Conversations? Let's read it from the perspective of a student that has been misunderstood. 

Elizabeth Pena: OK. A Time that a child might be teased or named called on the basis of their language. I think that we make a lot of assumptions on the basis of whether we can communicate with somebody or not. When a child is in a school setting and they can't speak English, and the majority of the school day is in English, then there might be assumptions made about whether that child speaks English or not. And then, it'll carry over to assumptions about whether they can understand or not, whether they can hear or not, and whether they're smarter or not. Those are the things that I think occur when children enter into a setting where their language isn't available to them and people aren't using their language. And I'm one of those kids too, actually. I started kindergarten not knowing English, and my mom says that we learned English at the same time. My parents are immigrants. I was born in the U.S. and I had some English exposure prior to kindergarten but kindergarten was the time that I started being completely immersed in English. I don't have clear memories of that but I can imagine that you're all of a sudden in this environment where everybody's speaking a language that you don't completely understand. And the opportunities for mismatch can be great.

Jenny Woo: Yeah. Let's talk about more about the mismatch incidents. The picture that you've painted is incredibly visual. I see a real-life of a child. It's already incredibly scary to not understand the language people are communicating and to not be able to communicate. To use my own personal experience, I felt like a mute but on top of that, the part where you study is how is that is being perceived and carried on. Tell me more about some of the biggest assumptions that you're seeing in the field as a researcher and as a Speech Language Pathologist in schools and home environments around these labels.

Elizabeth Pena: I've been in this field for over 30 years. I first started working as a Speech-Language Pathologist in school settings, preschool, and elementary school settings. And I do remember I was asked to come and do consult in a school district where every single Spanish speaking child had been identified with language delays or language impairment. And I talked to the Speech Pathologist there and I said this isn't possible. Of course, it wasn't possible and that's why they asked me to come in and consult. And they wanted me to reassess all these kids. And I said, well, let's talk and think this through. How did this happen? How did these kids come to being identified as having language impairment? The Speech Pathologist who spoke only English had done standardized testing with these kids in English. On the basis of mainly vocabulary tests, she found that they were very very low, which would make sense if English isn't their first language or their better language. It would make sense that they scored low on the vocabulary test--they couldn't understand the names of things they couldn't name things in English. They made a lot of errors. I went back and said, "okay, well what else did you do?" One of the things that she had done that were really nice was that she had observed them in the classroom and saw that a lot of these kids were communicating well with each other. They could have good conversational turn-taking. They seem to be using complete sentences. There were a couple of kids who seemed to be having much more difficulty making their needs known among their peers who spoke Spanish. You can observe those things. We rescreened all these kids and those couple of kids that she had identified as having problems communicating with peers actually turned out to be the children who truly had language disability and the other kids were typical learners who were in the process of learning English as a second language. But I think we see these kinds of assumptions. Making these wrong diagnoses can lead to negative outcomes for these kids because if you have a language delay, then you might get tracked in two different kinds of curriculum or you might receive the support that you didn't really need. As a result, you're missing out on the classroom curriculum and that kind of thing. Certainly, if kids truly have language impairment, then they need to be getting the support that they need in order to start to close the gap. Probably what we see now is the other end of this. And that is under-identification. When I started out my career, we saw a lot of overidentification, and so the work that I was trying to do was to reduce the overidentification of language impairment in children who were learning English as a Second Language. I think now what we're starting to see is when children speak a language other than English at home, then every area that children make or every difficulty that they might have in a classroom setting in English is attributed to second language acquisition. That's not the case either. We can have children who have both delays and are in the process of learning English as a second language.

Jenny Woo: That that definitely layers on the complexity. I can also see the implications of the type of recommendations that educators might provide. If you're bilingual, you're trying to learn but they're blaming it on the fact that you're learning both languages at the same time. How is that being dealt with? 

Elizabeth Pena: That's a huge challenge. What I've seen is some families are afraid to speak their home language to their child because they fear that it'll be confusing. We know that actually bilingualism is not confusing. Most of the world is bilingual people and they are not confused. That's something that we have to really be careful and help families support the use of the first language in the home. And it's the language in which they communicate on which you build relationships. It's the language that you use to communicate across generations, which is often the language of the home. That's going to be really critical in supporting that child. Of course, children need to learn English as a second language. But you don't want to do it at the cost in fact losing the first line. I think we need to be really careful in not implying that children should stop using their home language and shift to English. The other thing that happens is sometimes when families try to do that, they themselves don't speak complex English. The models that they may provide are not the higher-level models that they would be able to provide in their home language. You want to have those deep conversations that get into ideas and questions around life and interactions and kinds of conversations that you have that form those deep relationships, and that takes complex language to that. If the families don't speak English at that level, it's going to be hard to do. So, if you can provide that in the home language, that's going to be really critical.

Jenny Woo: That is so insightful. Sometimes as parents we want to be as helpful to the growth and the learning of our children as possible. But ironically, the example you gave us exactly what not to do. And you're thinking that you're helping. This reminds me of my personal experience as a school administrator for a Mandarin immersion Montessori preschool. You can imagine in preschool, right before you enter in first grade, parents are starting to get stressed, like "oh my gosh my kid didn't go to a traditional kindergarten has been in this Mandarin immersion. What do I do?" I used to get a lot of questions around do I speak Mandarin at home, or do I speak English at home. Is my child going to catch up? That's one. The second one is "should we practice with the child in Mandarin?" This is, in particular, coming from parents who really celebrate Mandarin but don't quite know how to speak it or are trying to learn it at the same time. You're right. The complexity of those linguistic usages is really not there. And so that type of modeling perhaps isn't as effective or even necessary. We've always advocated for bilingualism because there are researchers out there, and in fact, one of my professors at Harvard Graduate School of Education, Gigi Luk, who studied bilingualism and actually bilingualism with children with developmental language disorders. So yeah, parents stressed not: do what you're good at.

 Elizabeth Pena: Yup. Do what you're good at. That's really the bottom line. Read to your child, do those things and it's OK to do it in your better language to help promote that child's ideas, and they're going to be able to attach English to it as they get into school and as they're learning English.

Jenny Woo: I love how we touched upon these parenting myths and assumptions. Let's go back to the schools. I just love your work and you mentioned another latest thing that you're seeing that's been really frustrating is having families with children with language impairments being told that they should just focus on one language. You know especially when the home language is not English.

 Elizabeth Pena:  I think you see the same kind of thing happen. If we have children who have language disabilities or developmental language disorders or any other kind of disability that might affect language, often then there's an assumption that two languages are going to be too complex. One language is already complex math, two is going to make it twice as hard. And that's not at all true. There's this idea around desirable difficulties. Things that are hard are sometimes really good for us. That's where you're where you grow, where your brain grows, where you develop new skills and new insights into things. Language is a hard thing to learn and for some children, it's especially hard. And kids with DLD. It's the disorder where everything looks really typical, but kids are having a really hard time learning language and we don't really understand the underlying causes of it. It's really hard for them. Learning two languages is going to be hard too, but for whatever reason, it doesn't make you more delayed. Right. It doesn't make kids who are bilingual who have language impairment more delayed than monolingual kids with language impairment. Actually, bilingualism could be helpful. We're starting to see some evidence that just like bilingualism could help slow down the onset of Alzheimer's, bilingualism may be helpful for children with DLD.

Jenny Woo: Oh interesting. Wow, that is really exciting. And it reminded me of the Medical School class with Harvard professors, and they did mention the critical period for children as babies. The day that you're born, essentially. Our ability to recognize different intonations. Use it or leave it. It's going to be gone if you don't use it right.

Elizabeth Pena: You hear the sounds of your language and you recognize them, and babies can understand all these different sounds and sound contrasts and as they start to learn their own language, they lose the ability to tell the differences among sounds that are not in the language that they're learning. So bilingual kids can keep that window open a bit more. They have exposure to those different languages and can make those contrasts for a longer period of time. And that could help them. 

Elizabeth Pena: And I think the same kind of thing in learning grammar, for example, or learning vocabulary, different languages have different ways of expressing. Learning to do it in two different ways could be a good mental exercise. It's cognitive flexibility. It gives you that flexibility in this language you express it this way, but in this other language, you express it a different way. That gives kids insights about how languages work.

Jenny Woo: As a parent and as an educator, I really recognize the importance of learning even the language of math and the language of music and how that enhances your cognitive inhibition, shifting, executive function and those are all so interrelated. So, as informed parents, say that if I'm a parent of a child who is an English Language Learner so learning English for the first time with the home language, and I found out that my child has been misdiagnosed as having language impairment by the school. What can I do as a parent to advocate for my child?

Elizabeth Pena: As a parent you have rights. You have the right to participate in the IEP process, the Individual Education Plan. You have to be informed if they're going to do an individualized assessment of your child. If you don't think that anything is going on, you can refuse to consent to the assessment. If you think your child is performing within normal limits in their home language, then you can convey that during the IEP meeting. You can also ask for them to assess your child in their primary language. I think the best way of knowing whether a child does or doesn't have a developmental language disability is by testing them in both of their languages and putting that information together. So those are ways I think that you'd want to advocate for your child.

Elizabeth Pena: It could go the other way too though. You might think that your child has a developmental language disability. And the school may say well let's give them a little bit more time so that they can learn English. I think that's the trend that I'm seeing now, and I think that you need to push them to do an evaluation if you're concerned. I find that if families are concerned, if parents are concerned, then there's usually something going on. I think it's really important that you learn to be pushy and ask for that evaluation, ask for that evaluation in the home language, and don't wait. We know that early interventions are going to result in the best outcomes for kids. We want to start doing that therapy as soon as we possibly can. The other thing is if your child does have a DLD, do not let them tell you that you can't or that you shouldn't speak your home language. You can and you should. You don't want your child to miss those connections with extended family with grandparents, especially if grandparents only speak your home language. You want your child. You want to give your child every advantage that you can. Bilingualism is an advantage and you want to be able to give them that gift.

Jenny Woo: That is so reassuring. I'm saying that from the perspective of friends who are going through that. It's very viscerally close to home because I can certainly as a parent imagine that you're panicking. You're so frustrated and you just want your child to succeed. You try all you can to work on this English language. And unfortunately, it is at the detriment of cultural heritage. Let's talk a little bit more about inclusive learning culture or a learning environment because this reminds me of universal design for learning. In that case, I've seen more done as reading, seeing a video clip, or hearing it. But this takes it perhaps one step further and respecting your home language, bringing that into the classroom. What are some of the best practices now with your educator hat on that you see done in the classrooms?

 Elizabeth Pena: Sometimes when we're focused on bilingualism and we want to support the home language, we do support the home language but sometimes we do it at a low level. We might do it at the interpersonal communication level but not at the academic level. We need to consider academic language as well as interpersonal language. The language we use to talk to our friends is one style or one level of language. What we use to write reports, to use more sophisticated ideas to do science and social sciences, or to talk about literature has a greater language demand. Sometimes we think about bilingualism as using two languages, but we have to also think about what we're doing in each of those two languages. Not just that they're present but are we thinking about literature in two languages or rethinking about science. We're having these conversations around relationships in two languages and what children need to be able to do, what language they need, what words they need, and what vocabulary they need to be able to meet these different kinds of demands. Not just the everyday conversations of getting ready for school and coming home after school or doing homework or whatever, but really meeting these academic demands of the home language as well as in English. This is something that I think that sometimes we miss out on. It's hard to do. It's definitely more demanding. It's hard to find somebody who can teach science in another language because they were trained and often trained in the U.S. and they learned those terms that terminology in English. We need to be a little more thoughtful about supporting higher levels of language learning.

Jenny Woo: So fascinating. Anything you'd like to leave with the parents or teachers?

Elizabeth Pena: I think my bottom-line message is bilingualism is good for you. Don't give it up. It's something that your child will thank you for even if they don't thank you for it. Like piano lessons, right?

Jenny Woo: I hope my son will hear this someday. It's been documented. Thank you so much.

Elizabeth Pena: Thank you.

Jenny Woo: And thank you for tuning into 52 Essential Conversations.