Sociolinguistic and cultural considerations when working with multilingual children (original) (raw)

2012, McLeod, S. and Goldstein, B. (eds.), Multilingual Aspects of Speech Sound Disorders in Children (pp.13-23). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Overarching considerations when working with multilingual children concern the special status that continues to be accorded to multilingualism. Virtually all current knowledge about linguistic and cultural practices draws on monolingual and mono-cultural behaviour, whose "mono" character is glossed over and so tacitly emerges as default. In contrast, research on multilingualism invariably includes explicit reference to "multi" settings, thereby signalling an exceptionality worthy of a dedicated label. Multilingual children are "CLD", culturally and linguistically diverse, as if monolingual children were, by definition, culturally and linguistically homogeneous; or users of "heritage varieties", as if monolinguals lacked linguistic heritage. This chapter reviews sociolinguistic and cultural issues in multilingual settings, starting with a brief discussion of their relevance for extant assessment tools, and concluding with their implications for clinical work with multilingual children.

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