How do I say that in my language?

Elizabeth Rajan and Sean Pert reflect on the challenge of making language assessments accessible in Malayalam

The UK is increasingly diverse. Home language assessment and therapy is becoming the norm rather the exception in clinical practice. Children who speak languages other than English should have equitable access to speech and language therapy.

A bilingual therapist or interpreter can assess expressive language skills, allowing children who speak a language other than English to codeswitch, i.e alternate between two or more languages, which can demonstrate their language skills across both/all their languages. Children’s codeswitched utterances is their longest and the most representative of their language ability (Pert & Letts, 2006). It is therefore important that assessment takes place in the child’s home language as well as English. Using culturally relevant resources will help provide an inclusive and relatable assessment for the child. However, most of the assessments we currently use in clinic are not inclusive of bilingual children and may include illustrations that are unfamiliar to them, potentially limiting their responses.

Malayalam is a major language spoken in Kerala in South India, and approximately 65,000 speakers living in England and Wales (ONS, 2021). As a bilingual therapist, I wanted to create culturally and linguistically valid resources for Malayalam speakers.

Networking: a wonderful opportunity

I first encountered the Bilingual Assessment of Simple Sentences (BASS) (Pert et al. 2019) during an online course with the lead author. This simple but effective tool assesses the child’s ability to use two- and three-phrase expressive utterances. The BASS was originally developed for speakers of Pakistani heritage languages, Mirpuri, Punjabi and Urdu. I was keen to adapt the assessment into Malayalam to meet the needs of the large Malayalam speaking population in Dorset. This was a wonderful opportunity to apply my cultural and linguistic knowledge using an established framework of adaptation for assessment resources, the Translation Protocol (Pert, 2003).

Speaking a language is different from knowing its grammatical rules

The adaptation process helped me realise that there were many factors I needed to consider while translating the sentences from English into Malayalam. Although I speak Malayalam fluently, I have never consciously reflected on the syntactic and morphological rules of the language. I met with a professor in Malayalam to ensure that my interpretation of tenses in Malayalam was accurate.

Languages do not translate exactly or uniformly. Malayalam has many dialects, and there is a lack of published literature detailing the grammar. There are prefixes and suffixes that have no counterpart in English. Some words do not map into English due to different semantic nuances, such as the concept of contact in “hit the floor” for “sweeping the floor”.

“You don’t need to be bilingual to support bilingual clients, but it is essential to work alongside interpreters and have an understanding of how to sensitively assess and support bilingual families.”

It was less of a challenge to adapt the illustrations in the assessment so that they were easily recognised by Malayalam speakers because the original illustrations depicted an Asian community. Adapting this to suit a South Indian state only required some minor changes such as shorter sleeves, moustache instead of beard, and flip flops instead of shoes. I was fortunate that a family friend was happy to adapt the illustrations for me. The costs of illustrations should be considered in the planning when adapting an existing assessment.

You don’t need to be bilingual to support bilingual clients, but it is essential to work alongside interpreters and have an understanding of how to sensitively assess and support bilingual families. Bilingualism is an advantage when it comes to adapting resources and assessments. I urge bilingual speech and language therapists to think about ways they can utilise their language expertise and cultural insight to increase the number of assessments and culturally relevant resources available. Could you contribute to making services more accessible and promote inclusion of bilingual communities?

Bilingual assessment of simple sentences is free to access on the RCSLT website.

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References

Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC). (2023). Standards of proficiency – Speech and Language Therapists. London: HCPC

Office for National Statistics (ONS), (2022). ONS website, statistical bulletin, Language, England and Wales: Census 2021.

Pert, S., and Letts, C. (2006). Codeswitching in Mirpuri speaking Pakistani heritage preschool children: Bilingual language acquisition. The international journal of bilingualism : cross-disciplinary, cross-linguistic studies of language behavior, 10(3), 349-374.

Pert, S., and Stow, C. J. (2003). A Translation Protocol for Speech and Language Therapists 5th CPLOL Conference, Edinburgh, UK.