‘It’s like stealing what should be theirs’

A father of two autistic children was explaining to me how he viewed attempts to prevent his children from learning the family's community language in addition to English. He was clearly agitated and frustrated. 'It's their heritage at the end of the day! It's like stealing what should be theirs...' Another parent told me: 'I met a doctor about Ron's autism. He said straightaway: two languages with children like this complicates things. He didn't even know Ron... it was part of the rhetoric. He was over-generalising. I was shocked!'

Over several days, impassioned statements (Sher, Gibson & Browne, 2021) such as these recurred time and again. They revealed families' hurt, shock, and anger at the notion of forced monolingualism – being prevented from gaining ability in a second language, despite one's family or culture being bilingual (Clyne, 1991, 2005; Öztürk & Howard, 2018).

Forced monolingualism

The concept of forced monolingualism has its roots in the Australian governmental policy of insisting upon English monolingualism during the colonial era. This spearheaded the extinction of 100 Aboriginal languages since 1788 and threatened at least 100 others. Forced monolingualism has been explained as a symptom of a power-holder's desire for uniformity, as uniformity is more easily controlled. South Africa's apartheid regime had this objective when it brusquely enforced Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in key subjects in non-white schools.

Of course, forced monolingualism does not necessarily need to unfold in such dramatic or oppressive circumstances and often unwittingly occurs without intention to harm, in less egregious contexts. Research has revealed a ubiquitous propensity of practitioners, including teachers, psychiatrists, psychologists, and speech and language therapists, to counsel bilingual parents to limit their autistic child's exposure to a second language as much as possible (e.g. Beauchamp & MacLeod, 2017; Drysdale et al., 2015; Gréaux et al., 2020; Hampton et al., 2017; Jegatheesan, 2011; Kremer-Sadlik, 2005; Ohashi et al., 2012; Uljarevic´ et al., 2016; Yu, 2013). To take one example, research by Kay-Raining Bird et al. (2012), found that of 49 parents of autistic children (mean age = 8.6 years), a mere 12.5 per cent were advised to pursue a bilingual/multilingual approach and 62.5 per cent were counselled not to expose their child to a second language.

This monolingual approach hinders autistic children's integration with their communities and families. It's an additional, understudied inequality that autistic children face. So why does it go on?

Reasons proffered to explain practitioners' monolingual preference include the belief that a second language causes language confusion and that it impedes acquisition of the majority language (Jegatheesan et al., 2010; Kay-Raining Bird et al., 2012; Kremer-Sadlik, 2005; Y'Garcia et al., 2012; Yu, 2013). This is not supported by empirical evidence. One such study, involving 75 autistic children (Hambly & Fombonne, 2012) found no language delays associated with bilingualism, the authors concluding that parents should not be discouraged from maintaining bilingual homes or introducing a second language.

Parents are often forced to make the distressing choice between their child's academic needs and their community or heritage linguistic partialities.

In fact, monolingual arguments are often based on 'logic' rather than evidence – as some autistic children may struggle with mastering one language, learning two languages must be more complicated than learning one (Ijalba, 2016; Lim et al., 2018). Paradoxically, research suggests several cognitive and social benefits of bilingualism (Beauchamp & MacLeod, 2017; Dai et al., 2018; Genesee et al., 1996; Lund et al., 2017). Autistic children who learn two languages exhibit better performance on certain set-shifting tasks (Gonzalez-Barrero & Nadig, 2019), score higher on total expressive vocabulary measures (Petersen et al., 2012), and are more likely to gesticulate and vocalise than their monolingual peers (Valicenti-McDermott et al., 2013).

There are parallels to forced monolingualism in other contexts. For example, there is a long history (stretching back to the Second International Congress on the Education of the Deaf in Milan, 1880) of practitioners discouraging sign language for deaf children, and insisting on oral education (Berke, 2020). There is a time-worn belief that sign language hampers spoken language development in deaf children, despite the fact that there is no empirical evidence for sign language exposure causing such harm. There is, however, some evidence for its benefits, and certainly, a growing corpus of literature now shows that lack of language access has a negative impact on deaf children (Hall, 2017). Families are frequently counselled not to expose their deaf children to sign language. Inflexible attitudes based upon ideological stances pressure parents, and this sometimes results in outcomes that could compromise deaf children's developmental needs, including the critical importance of deaf children gaining fluency in a language (such as American Sign Language) in the limited timeframe of early childhood (Humphries et al. 2012).

Impact

Over half the world's population speak more than one language. The predilection to advise against bilingualism limits children's vocabularies and encumbers community language maintenance. The impact of this is evident both within the UK and internationally.

To take one domestic example, Wales has two national languages, and research reveals that parents greatly value their children gaining bilingual ability in both Welsh and English (Howard et al., 2019). However, there are no specialist autistic schools providing Welsh-medium academic provision. As such, parents are often forced to make the distressing choice between their child's academic needs and their community or heritage linguistic partialities. The ineffective state of affairs for students with additional learning needs hoping to gain bilingual ability has now been clearly referenced in Welsh governmental reports on education (e.g. Roberts, 2017).

Parents believe that denying an autistic child the chance to gain ability in a second language is discriminatory.

Internationally, recommendations that autistic children have reduced exposure to a second language often injuriously affects the parent-child relationship. This is the case where parents' first language is not that of the dominant culture and their children do not have ability in the community language. One Chinese parent in the United States relayed her concerns: 'I'm actually quite worried that they will forget Chinese, then our channels of communication would not be so open....' (Yu, 2013). Limiting children to one language also often means that autistic children are disadvantaged when attempting to build relationships with extended family who may have very little proficiency in the dominant societal language, such as English.

Critically, research reveals that autistic children's opportunities to acclimatise themselves to their family's cultural, religious, and communal life are dramatically curtailed when they have no ability in the language their communities use for socialising, prayer, and quotidian discussions. Ethnographic studies show how children are sometimes even excluded from everyday dinner-time family conversations. In many cases, alienation from the family's culture may ensue (Kremer-Sadlik, 2005). One study found this occurred amongst autistic children who did not speak Armenian and so lost interest in attending Armenian-language events, whilst another found this phenomenon among autistic children of Chinese immigrants to the United States (Yu, 2013). Children declared they were American and not Chinese and expressed annoyance that their parents conversed in Mandarin and not in English.

This global issue is pertinent to all diasporic groups worldwide that endeavour to mitigate community language attrition and cultural assimilation, such as Spanish-speaking communities in the USA and Chinese, Gujarati, and Polish communities for example. A recent policy paper has gone as far as to argue that unconsidered monolingual approaches are an infringement on autistic children's basic human rights (Gréaux et al., 2020). Crucially, it should be noted that such concerns do not refer to cases when children struggle to even gain proficiency in one primary language.

Is there another way?

It is now clear that there is at least one community that rejects the commonplace and unnuanced monolingual approach recommended by practitioners for autistic children. A country-wide research study within the Jewish community, which I led through the Cambridge University Faculty of Education with contribution from Dr Wendy Browne and Professor Jenny Gibson, revealed startling results (Sher et al., 2021, published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders). The study on Hebrew-English bilingualism focused on the experiences of 22 parents and 31 practitioners who cared for 168 Jewish autistic children. We collected data from 20 mainstream and 4 specialist autism schools, representing all denominations of Judaism, in 10 local authorities across the UK.

The analysis revealed that religious continuity is a crucial factor in bilingual decision-making, as prayers and Scripture are studied or spoken in Hebrew. Most unexpectedly, findings differed from previous literature in non-Jewish settings, in that both Jewish parents and practitioners felt that a default monolingual approach was unjust, in accord with conceptions of forced monolingualism. This was exemplified by this representative statement of a Jewish SENDCo: 'I think they need to be very cautious... we cannot clip the wings of people... every person who makes a [monolingual] recommendation should really be very, very careful and not generalise.'

Innovative, bespoke flashcard memorisation methods tailored for autistic children were devised by Jewish educators as an aid to enable autistic children to study Hebrew words and scripture. Parents believed that denying an autistic child the chance to gain ability in a second language was discriminatory. As one parent explained 'Don't limit your child's future by saying 'Oh... he has ASD... I may as well teach him English... but it's too hard to read Hebrew'... Otherwise, you're just leaving them with an even bigger disability... you're extending the disability, not minimising it' (Sher et al., 2021).

It is essential that practitioners recognise the importance of linguistic and cultural diversity when considering how best to support autistic children from minority backgrounds.

Critically, in both Jewish parents' and practitioners' experience, autistic children who were able to acquire proficiency in English did not have difficulty in also gaining ability in a second language. In fact, participants revealed that often they found that autistic children gained bilingual proficiency with greater ease than their neurotypical counterparts. Unlike other educational settings, the default approach in Jewish schools was to teach autistic children two languages. As one headmaster of a large Jewish school explained simply: 'We are ambitious...for them to achieve like the other children. Our autistic children usually learn Hebrew...like the rest of the class.' Another therapist scathingly referred to default monolingual approaches as 'old-fashioned' and depriving autistic children of valuable linguistic resources. This community-wide approach of encouraging bilingualism wherever appropriate engendered a sense of great achievement and empowerment in autistic children.

Practical recommendations

How might we best respect the cultural and linguistic values of autistic children's families, and balance this with our duty of care for the children themselves? It seems crucial that cultural awareness of the centrality of community languages for diverse communities is needed for practitioners working with children from cultures which place value on such languages. Ensuring this cultural sensitivity can be most easily achieved (where relevant) by matching autistic students with psychologists and educators from backgrounds which similarly value the language in question. As seen in the study within the Jewish community, these professionals will likely be cognisant of communal and parental aspirations concerning the second language.

However, this is by no means the only or most practicable way of ensuring mindfulness of these issues. Wherever increased awareness of the importance of the community language is present amongst psychologists and teachers of any background, parents feel more reassured in the advice on language choices offered by practitioners. Such mutually-respectful relationships often also promote children successfully gaining bilingual proficiency. This has been found to be the case for practitioners engaging with children from BAME and other communities with community languages. This suggestion accords with research undertaken by the Training and Development Agency (TDA) in England, which revealed that newly qualified teachers felt they did not have adequate training to successfully engage with students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Similarly, McPake and colleagues (2007) also called for teacher training and professional development which furnishes information on the advantages of plurilingualism. Experts in the field have highlighted the importance of such awareness. When I spoke with her for this article, Jenny Gibson, professor at Cambridge University with extensive research expertise on autism and language-learning, emphasised this: 'It is essential that practitioners recognise the importance of linguistic and cultural diversity when considering how best to support autistic children from minority backgrounds. It is a myth that autistic children can only learn one language. Our research shows that speaking home languages with family and friends can be incredibly important for building social connections, participating in cultural life, and fostering a sense of wellbeing.'

More fundamentally, psychologists should have knowledge of the extensive privation of social, communal and communicatory opportunities that unnuanced default monolingual approaches cause. They threaten to impair communication between autistic children and parents or family that only have ability in a community language. Correspondingly, the manifold concrete positive outcomes of autistic children gaining bilingual proficiency should be noted, including enhanced familial and communal cohesion, a sense of empowerment and achievement, and greater access to social, religious, and communicatory experiences.

If I could get you to spread one message, it's that empirical research has not found evidence of an injurious impact on linguistic development caused by learning a second language. This in itself should encourage decision-making amongst psychologists and other practitioners that is based on evidence and not intuition.

Rabbi David Ariel Sher, B.Sc. (Hons) Psych, M.A. (Dist.) J.Ed, M.Phil. Psych. & Ed. (Cantab, Dist.) MBPsS conducted research on this topic whilst at Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge. At present, David is at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford.