Getting a language sample from a preschooler can be a formidable task when you don't know the child, when he speaks Spanish and you're in a strange place such as a clinic office or classroom. The variables that influence the language sample, such as the context, the materials, the speakers, and the procedures used during the elicitation of the sample are all important. We really don't know much about how the procedures that we learned in graduate school are impacting the representativeness of the sample from children from other cultures. I assume that it has to in some form.
As an example, Heath (1986) stated that many Hispanic children are raised to not consider themselves as equal conversational partners to adults. The role is that of respect of adult interactions and not to intrude or think of oneself as equal and having the privilege to speak. Hispanic children do speak with adults, such as family gatherings, parties, and special occasions. There is a time and place. I've heard clinicians describe Hispanic children as "seen and not heard." This isn't the perspective that I understand and grew up with, but rather, it's "don't speak right now, the adults are speaking, show the adults that you're well behaved, and I'll explain or tell you later." So many children do grow up without practice in speaking to strangers, such as a speech-language pathologist who will ask unusual questions about the family, what television shows the child likes to watch, how to play sports, or about a movie. Sometimes the clinician will ask for a story from books, or pictures. The topics are about something objective, not always personal. Topics may be strange and different from what the child may be used to hearing about at home. And the clinician rarely says anything about him/herself.
I once asked two experienced bilingual bicultural clinicians to elicit language samples from 34 Spanish-speaking Mexican-American preschoolers. The preschoolers also interacted with each other by pairs. I hypothesized that I would get better and larger samples from the child-child interactions than from the clinician-child interactions. The equal conversational partner hypothesis was the basis of this project. The children were matched by age but not by gender. I believe that it was serendipity, because I had pairs that were male-male, male-female, and female-female. What I didn't expect were the roles that these children played out for us. The male-male interactions were territorial. The toys were not shared, there were glares at each other, and the boys didn't speak to each other. The female-male interactions were much different. The females were dominant, the boys listened with obvious annoyance, and the girls did the majority of the talking with the boys trying to play without the female interference. The female-female interactions were congenial, talkative, and they shared the toys. I never expected these traditional Mexican roles to show up so early. For example, the girls are raised to be independent and take care of the male, the male is to be a little dependent and allow the female to dominate, and the boys were already showing a certain amount of male ego and territorial play. Culture wasn't part of my framework when I thought about this project. I never completed the project because I went through the child pairs thinking that I was taping, the batteries had died.
For the topic variable I learned something this summer. I've been working with a group of eight Spanish speaking preschoolers in our preschool clinic. The children have a variety of speech and language impairments and are receiving treatment in the public schools during the academic year. This university clinic is not part of the schools, but during the summer, we offer this preschool and my graduate students provide therapy in the classroom while the other children are involved in free-play, art, and music. The classroom is housed in our College of Education. The parents are responsible for transportation to and from the class. Two of the boys didn't have transportation home, so I offered to take them home after class. I wanted to get to know the brothers, so we talked during the 20 minutes drive to the outskirts of Las Cruces where they lived. The topics of our conversations were very different than what is usually done in our clinic setting. The first time I drove them home, they had found a set of photographs of my trip to Mexico and some were of my children. They wanted to know where in Mexico I had gone, why I went, what I did while I was there, and who were the people in the photos, especially the little girl. They asked if the man in the photo was my novio, and whether I had a novio (boyfriend). This brought up the younger brothers' escapades with his two 3 year-old girlfriends. The conversation was funny! And they wanted to know about me. I think this is probably something that we don't do enough of when we interact with children. We really don't allow them to know us as people.
One day we had a guitarist come to the classroom. He sang Spanish songs and allowed the children to strum his guitar. My 3 year old buddy, loved one of the songs, La Bamba. On the way home, he asked me to sing the song. I sang it again, and again, and again. Canta mucho, mucho, mas, mas. By the time we arrived to their street, he was singing with me including, "yo no soy marinero, yo no soy marinero, soy capitan, soy capitan, a la bamba." He definitely learned a new song in 20 minutes. On another occasion, he was interested in religion. He asked if I prayed to Diosito or La Virgin. He told me about his mother and who she prayed to and how he was trying to figure out who to pray to. Then he asked if I said "Santa, Santa, Santa", when I was upset. His mother did and wondered what it meant. His life, the activities of home, the sayings used in the home, religion, music, and getting to know me were all topics that I just didn't think these preschoolers would bring up during our short time together.
Tapping into the children's world, their funds of knowledge and experiences, are so important as we try to elicit that so very critical language sample. We need to be creative and move out of our zones of the usual clinical practice so that we can legitimately say that the sample we obtained from our young client is one that expresses his/her reality and not our own.
