The Language Brokering Behaviour of Young Children in Families of Pakistani Heritage

The Language Brokering Behaviour of Young Children in Families of Pakistani Heritage.

Nigel Hall and Anne Robinson

1999

The language brokering behaviour of young children in families of Pakistani origin1

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The nature and significance of language brokering

As long as people and communities move from one country to another which uses a different language there will be issues relating to how families cope with the readjustment processes involved. It is also clear that in such circumstances children also face many readjustments either because they share the dislocation or because they are born in the adopted country in a family unit which uses a family language that is different from the national language. Such issues have been well documented on many levels but one which seems less observed is a particular language responsibility which often falls upon children (often quite young children), is of language brokering between parents and members of the adopted country.

The term ‘language brokering’ is used to mean a child’s activity in an event during which it mediates between two different language speakers or writers/readers, and in which it is actively involved in converting meanings in one language into meanings in another. Such an activity is not simply a neutral, formal, linguistic, dictionary exercise in the ability to translate one set of words into another. As Vasquez et al (1994, p96) stated in their research: “Translation or interpretation events fit our definitions of intercultural transactions because translating involves recourse to multiple sources of linguistic and cultural knowledge in order to create meaning, negotiate a task, or solve a problem.” As the child is inevitably involved in cultural meanings as well as linguistic ones, the use of the term brokering has become more common to describe these activities (Gentemann, 1983; Shannon, 1990, and McQuillan and Tse, 1995); it is a term used originally by the anthropologists Wolf and Clifford to describe the activities of individuals who connected local with national worlds (Robins, 1996)and is therefore particularly appropriate for the activities of these translating children.

It is not unreasonable to say that such activities might be critical to the basic functioning of a minimally English-speaking family within an English-speaking language culture (Shannon, 1990; Kaur and Mills, 1993; McQuillan and Tse, 1995; and Hall and Sham, 1998). Children, as language brokers, can find themselves acting in many of the family’s social, economic and administrative activities. In such situations children are not simply constructing the world for themselves but are playing principal roles in constructing versions of the new world for other family members. Being a language broker makes complex linguistic and cognitive demands upon children but it also offers them positions of power and responsibility within the family, a position which is often at odds with their more general role as children in a family as well as one which might generate some difficulties for parents. It is a role which clearly challenges conventional notions of the relationship between chronological age and social age, chronological age and responsibility, and chronological age and power (Solberg, 1990; James and Prout, 1997), but this then raises the issue of how children develop the skills necessary to handle the cognitively and socially complex situations of language brokering, the manifestations of which constitute the challenges.

For the children, the act of family language brokering places them in a rather different context to the autonomous language and literacy discourses they are experiencing at school (Street, 1995). It involves them in the more demanding world of roles, networks and values in the richer and cognitively more complex ecology of families and communities. Thus the discourse community of home and that of school may be substantially different in the demands they make upon children (Wagner, 1993; Schieffelin and Cochran-Smith 1984). The language brokering child’s role within the family is one which yields access to a far richer understanding of the complex ecology of life than does schooling, and within this the ideological language and literacy practices demand a more sophisticated and situated use of language and literacy.

As far as the research literature is concerned, children’s language brokering is relatively unseen. It might even be appropriate to describe it as ‘invisible’ as has been claimed for many other children’s activities (Solberg, 1994; Morrow, 1995; Books, 1998). This metaphorical assertion has to be qualified as the activities to which it refers are clearly anything but invisible to the child and other participants in brokering events; it is from political, educational, research and, inevitably, adult perspectives that they often appear invisible. In the research literature it is a phenomenon which gets mentioned in passing, the paragraph here and there, rather than considered as an important subject of study in its own right. When it does merit a mention it is usually in the context of a wider study, for instance into children’s participation in Chinese take-away businesses (Song, 1996), learning to read culturally (Schieffelin and Cochran-Smith (1984), literacy development (Zanger, 1994) and literacy in second-language families (Weinstein-Shr, 1994).

Only four studies have given the phenomenon a central focus. Shannon reported (in Shannon,1990, and Vasquez, Pease-Alvarez and Shannon,1994) on two children in Mexicano families she was studying in California. This study is particularly important not just for what Shannon has to say generally about the phenomenon of child language brokers, but because it contains what seems to be the only published transcription of an actual language brokering event. Leti, an eleven-year-old Mexicano child translates for her mother (essentially non-English speaking) and a chiropractor (essentially non-Spanish speaking) and the mother happened to have a tape-recorder in her purse and recorded the conversation. This apparently unique transcription shows clearly just how complex an event this is for Leti, but it also shows that despite one, possibly critical, error she copes very well with the task.

McQuillan and Tse (1995) interviewed nine adults, from five different language communities, who as children translated for parents and others. These were of course memories of brokering and it is inevitably unclear how representative were these higher educated people (they were all university students and friends) of the wider population. Kaur and Mills (1993) are the only people to involve any younger children. They interviewed fifty-two people: twenty-four pupils from primary and secondary schools, seventeen parents and eleven teachers. All the children and parents were from Punjabi families in the UK. Again, their data reveals the dependence of the parents, the complexity for the children, the apparent general success the children have with brokering, and the existence of a degree of stress for the children in performing the task.

All three studies are quite different in conception, and each is important in opening up the topic, but each also has considerable limitations. Shannon’s work allows access to an actual event but involves only two children, McQuillan and Tse have been relatively systematic but rely on the memories of successful academic subjects, and Kaur and Mills offer access to children’s own comments but fail to contextualise these to the extent that we never even know whether the children speaking are of elementary or secondary age.

One final study interviewed a number of Chinese adolescents (aged from thirteen to nineteen) about their current and past language brokering experiences (Hall and Sham, 1998). What was surprising about this data was the extent to which it revealed the considerable complexity of some of the brokering situations experienced by children, dealing with health inspectors, lawyers, accountants, and that, perhaps not surprisingly, that the children experienced considerable stress, upset and sense of being failure in these events:

I grow up with fear, worry and uncertainty. Every time I need to help our parents to translate letters or do interpreting I get all stressed up and worry if I have done the correct translation or interpretation. (p7)

The whole thing, being an interpreter for my parents, my family. I feel it is too much sometimes. I often ask myself why my mum and dad came to England? (p8)

For these children the brokering task was a substantial burden and one which was carried out for duty rather than pleasure, and sometimes performed with resentment.

That such events are complex for children is substantiated in a paper by Harman (1994) which reported on the use of secondary school students to act as interpreters for teacher and parents at school parents’ evenings. In order to make it work they had to train the children across six sessions as it was felt that the task might have been too complex. As Harman puts it, “An untrained interpreter may be unable to put aside personal opinions and bias and may therefore give a distorted interpretation of an issue” (p145). She also comments that interpreters used on an ad hoc basis may be too young to discuss particular issues, may not be able to throw light on differences in culture, values and expectations, and may have to deal with personal issues.

Harman’s claims about needing to train the secondary children as language brokers because of the task difficulties has to be considered alongside the above four studies in which, undoubtedly quite typically, none of the children had received any formal instruction or training in their brokering tasks. If these children had no training then through what experiences or processes did they develop their competencies. In order to address this question we undertook an investigation of a group of younger children (aged between nine and eleven) in families living in the UK but who were of Pakistani origin.

The study

This study was carried out in one school in central Manchester which had a large intake of children from families of Asian origin (mostly Pakistani). Four year groups of children, two each from years five and six, were initially surveyed to identify a central sample. In all 114 children (59 boys and 55 girls) were asked by their teachers if they spoke a language in addition to English. All those who indicated they did (60 children - 52% of the 114 - 31 boys and 29 girls) were asked to fill in a very simple questionnaire. They were asked what languages they spoke (9 different languages across the whole group) and if so, did they ever have to translate for anyone. The word ‘translate’ was used rather than ‘broker’ as it was felt it would be more comprehensible to the children; the metaphor of brokering is more abstract than the literality of ‘translation’. In addition, the teachers administering the questionnaire were free to explain and discuss any terms in it. In the later interviews it was clear from the answers that most of the children had a clear notion of what translation meant, particularly in relation to what we are here terming ‘language brokering’

I’d say what they say to my mum and then my mum would tell me what to say. (G:10)

(In all our quotations we indicate the gender and age of the child concerned.) Of the 60 bilingual children 49 (82%, 25 boys and 24 girls) had experience of translating for family members (and that means that out of the 114 children in the four classes 43% translated. Clearly this school is atypical in containing a large percentage of Pakistani children but, nevertheless, there are many schools across the UK which do have large numbers of children from one or two ethnic groups. While we have no data which would allow us to extrapolate across the country, our data would suggest that a substantial number of children in the UK might be involved in language brokering activities. This is not a minor phenomenon.

A final question asked if those who translated would be willing to be interviewed about it. Offering the children choice was important to this study and at a number of points the children we offered the opportunity to make their own decisions about participation or continuing to participate (Thomas and O’Kane, 1988). Parental permission was sought from the parents of those children who were willing to be interviewed. From this group 19 children (12 boys and 7 girls) from Pakistani families were interviewed. In all cases descriptors of family ethnic origin and languages spoken came from the children. The term ‘family language’ or ‘family languages’ is used to indicate the language(s) other than English used in the home.

Each child was interviewed on their own. Within each interview both focussed and open questions were asked of the children. The children were shown the tape recorder and the microphones, were shown a book written by the researchers which involved children and for which some children had drawn pictures of the researchers for the back cover, and it was explained to the children that we might like to use what they tell us and write about it. The children were shown how in that book names that were ‘not real’ were used for children’s work, and each child in the current study was then able to chose their own pseudonym that we would use should we want to name any quotations. It was explained again to the children (for the teachers had already told the children) that it was their expertise and skill which interested us, and that we wanted to hear what they could tell us. This also helped make it clear to the children that there were no right of wrong answers to our questions.

The children ranged between nine and eleven years of age. Thirteen of the children were born in the UK. The other four were born in Pakistan. One came to the UK as a baby of two years of age, one at four and one at seven. Almost all the children came from large families (average number of children was 5.5 per family). Six of the seventeen were the eldest in the family, although four of these came from families with three or less children children.

Fourteen of the children spoke Urdu, with six of these children also speaking (in one case only comprehending) Punjabi. Two children spoke Bengali and one spoke what she called Pakistani. The children were asked which language they were best at speaking. Five claimed equal proficiency in Urdu and English, three felt Urdu was their best language and one selected Bengali. All the rest claimed English as the language in which they had most proficiency. At home, all except one of the children reported that the language usually spoken with the parents was not English, while the language spoken with the siblings was English in all cases save two. Seven of the children had grandparents either living at home or nearby and conversation with these was always in the family language.

Where writing was concerned, eleven children wrote only English, and those that wrote another language suggested that writing competence was minimal in that language (“just a bit of Urdu” being a typical response). The language mostly read or written within the home varied. Six children reported that the family mostly read and wrote English, four indicated that English and the family language were read and written equally, while in five cases it was mostly the family language that was read or written.

The children were asked to indicate in very general terms their parents’ ability to speak English. Seven suggested that their mothers’ English was reasonably good, while ten suggested that it “was not so good” or said “only a bit”. Again seven (not the same children) suggested that their fathers’ English was good while the remainder typically used the phrases “not so good” or “not much”. Three children indicated that the father could not speak English at all.

How often do the children language broker?

The children were offered three categories to indicate how often they translated. One chose ‘often’, two chose ‘hardly ever’ and fourteen chose ‘sometimes’. The girl who chose ‘often’ was the eldest child in a small family, so it is not surprising that a heavier burden should fall upon her. Clearly the frequency of language brokering is likely to be affected by many factors. Elder children are likely to be the most proficient at English, although where an elder child was born outside the UK and did not arrive until later, it could be a younger child whose English was best. However, younger children in a moderate-to-large family might be unlikely to be used frequently in brokering events if there were more competent older children around. Several children commented on this choice by parents:

Very less, mostly because my big brothers and sisters translate. (B:9)

Like sometimes they call my sisters because they are bigger than me to help them but if they are not there I have to help them. (B:10)

Because there’s other people as well. (G:11)

In one case in which a girl brokered mostly for her mother it was because her father preferred to use her brothers. However, on the whole, the children we interviewed indicated that parents would use whoever was around at the time and this would sometimes mean using a younger child. Informal interviews we have carried out with some adults from Asian families suggest that younger children might not take on language brokering responsibilities until older children left home or became independent enough to ‘avoid’ the responsibility. Despite this, there are going to be moments when a parent does need to call upon a younger child: