Why linguistic diversity in the classroom makes for better thinkers

This brief introduction to the "Language for Thinking" was originally prepared for group of 1500+ international school teachers at the start of a professional learning day addressing the challenges and opportunities of having speakers of so many different languages in the same classroom. The video comprises audio and slides. The script is reproduced below.

What does language have to do with me?

I love language but most of the people I meet do not.  For most people, language is like blinking: it’s something we do automatically, and to stop and think about it feels unnatural and uncomfortable.

Isn’t language just about communication?  What does it have to do with chemistry or geography or maths?  If students are struggling to communicate in English, they may need some help, but that’s a specialist’s job - and only so that they can then get on with what really matters.  Right?  An athlete with an injury may need physiotherapy, but only so they can get back on the field. 

And isn’t communication essentially a solved problem now?  We have all seen the demos from the big AI companies, haven’t we, which show how naturally two people can converse with each other in different languages thanks to instant translation from AI.

To address these perfectly legitimate questions, we need to think for a few minutes about what language is and how it works.

Thinking of language as labels

Shakespeare’s Juliet reasons: “That which we call a rose / by any other name would smell as sweet.”  It doesn’t matter whether you call it a “trëndafil” like the Albanians, a “kacay” like the Somalis or a “gül” like the Turks, the flower itself is the same.

So we tend to think of languages like a huge spreadsheet.  In the first column are the various elements of reality (rose, water, mountain, love etc).  The other columns contain the labels for those elements in different languages.  

Thinking is what we do with the elements, and it does not matter which set of labels we use.

The trouble is, that is not how either reality or language work! 

How we actually perceive things

As we look at the world around us, our eyes let in only a proportion of the light, which they focus on to our retinas to convert into electrical signals that are relayed to our brains.  Our brains then use the languages we know to make sense of those signals.

The visible light spectrum is the part of the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation which our eyes can see.  The number of colours in this range is infinite, but our brains break them down into just a handful of categories - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet.  

Picking two specific points, we see here two blue squares: both belong to the same category (blue) but the one on the left is light and the one on the right is dark.  Except if you are Russian, in which case you do not have a word for “blue” and instead see these blocks as belonging to two distinct categories: “Голубой (goluboy)” on the left and “Синий (siniy)” on the right.  

Of course the same could apply equally in other parts of the spectrum.  English, for example, did not have a separate category for orange until 1502.  Before then, that colour was seen either as a kind of red or a kind of yellow, depending on its particular hue.  

And in modern printing, the entire colour spectrum comprises blends of just four categories: cyan (a kind of blue), magenta (a kind of red), yellow and black.  

We would like to believe that we see things objectively; but in fact, what we see is a subjective perception of reality, constructed by our brains from a relatively small amount of data. No matter the subject field, in navigating the world we all work with a three layer funnel: there is the infinity of reality; there is the data that our sensory hardware is able to detect; and there is how our brains interpret that data.  And the software which our brains run is shaped by the language or languages we know. 

This means that language is integral to thinking. Languages are not just means of communication; they are means of thought.  Languages shape both what we perceive and how we process what we perceive.

How language works

i Categories

As we have observed, different languages categorise things in different ways.  Let’s take three more examples:

• If you were to ask a student for a “glass” in English they would bring you something like the item on the left here.  But if you correctly translated “glass” into Chinese and asked them for a “杯子,” they might equally well bring you something like one of items on the right.
  
  

• If you were to show your students a collection like this, they might reasonably expect them all to be different kinds of “nut.” In fact, only the 4 on the left are true “nuts,” botanically speaking.  The other 9 items fall into 7 different categories: legumes, seeds, corms, drupes, gourds, pastries and cookies.  This is a particularly English problem: other languages do not give these things such misleading names.
  
  

• Here’s the periodic table.  Now most of us, I’m guessing, have never really been able to make too much of this despite years of education.  We know it has something to do with the elements of which our universe is composed, but probably not much more. 

Now look at this table through the eyes of an 8 year old with no knowledge of Chinese.  Ask them to look at the large characters in the middle of each square, and see if they can spot any patterns. 

Pretty quickly, they’ll begin to notice the blocks seem to fall into 4 basic categories, where each character contains one of the 4 shapes at the top.

Let them know that those 4 shapes represent metal, stone, gas and liquid and within a couple of minutes our primary school student has gained a fundamental insight into the reality of the material world that escaped me for more than 3 decades of looking at the periodic table in English.

ii Metaphors

Secondly, languages work by using metaphor. Again, let’s take three examples:

• Here is a dull piece of political reporting, but it relies on metaphor to express even the most banal information.  Plans are likened to fabric or meat; conflict is likened to a volcano; productivity is likened to a ship; people’s response is likened to the weather; and politeness is likened to a building.
  
  

• Here is a post from the Language Nerds on Instagram, showing how different languages draw our attention to different ways we can think about money - as something that we make or win or reap or earn or do or gain or find or pull out. 
  
  

• In English, it is usual to picture time as a horizontal line, along which we are moving from left to right.  “Last” is a contraction of “latest” and indicates the most recent of the weeks behind us; “next” means the “nearest,” referring to the weeks in front of us.  By contrast, Chinese presents last week as being above us and next week below.

iii Associations

Thirdly, languages work by association and connection.  Let’s take two flowers as examples:

• Poppy
  
  This is a famous painting from 1872 by the French Impressionist Claude Monet.  Poppy fields like this were common where much of the fighting of the First World War took place.  For that reason, the poppy was adopted in Britain as a symbol of remembrance for lives lost in war and is especially worn around Armistice Day on 11 November.
  
  So here is the former British Prime Minister, David Cameron, being welcomed by former Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to China in November 2010.  Note the poppy in Cameron’s lapel.  And here is Cameron five years later, this time hosting China’s President Xi Jinping in the UK.  Again, note the poppy in his lapel.
  
  The trouble is that the poppy has strong associations in the mind of Chinese people too.  It reminds them not of self-sacrifice, but of a century of humiliating foreign oppression - at the hands of Britain in particular - which began in 1840 with the first Opium War.  

The same object evokes strong emotions in both Britain and China, but the wildly different associations run counter to any hopes of friendly and profitable partnership.

• Blue Pea
  
  This flower is very common in South and South-East Asia and is used for a variety of purposes, including dying rice a funky blue colour.  In Malaysia it was given the name “Telang.” 
  
  English-speakers identified itt as a member of the pea family and called it the “Bluebell pea” because of its resemblance to a similarly coloured flower in Europe. 
  
  In Chinese, people also recognised it as a kind of pea but thought that it was not so much its colour as its two petals that made the flower distinctive.  They reminded them of wings, so they called it the “Butterfly pea” or “Pigeon wings.” 
  
  What struck Tamil speakers was that the flower grew on a creeper and - in their eyes - resembled a seashell.  They called it the “Shell creeper.” 
  
  Malay does not compare the flower to anything else; English likens it to a European flower shaped like a bell; Chinese imagines it fluttering in the sky; and Tamil sees it swaying beneath the waves.
  
  (If you like that example, let me encourage you to sign up to a free monthly newsletter from “Linguafour,” which is where it came from.)

Let’s now wrap up this warm up act with 3 summary points.

Three summary points

1. Different languages, different interpretations

Firstly, different languages offer us different interpretations of the same reality.  Because different languages categorise things differently and use different metaphors to talk about them, leveraging the diversity of languages that we have in our classrooms can help us to overcome our own blind spots and to discover a fuller and more objective understanding.

2. Students are not blank canvases

Secondly, it should now be apparent that our students are not blank canvases.  The languages they already speak will have given them a host of cognitive and emotional associations with the various elements of any subject that we explore with them.  And those associations may be very different to our own and to those of other students in the class.

3. Stumbling blocks and stepping stones

Finally, these differences may present stumbling blocks on our students’ learning journey.  As teachers, we need continually to try to tease these differences out and be sensitive to them.   

But these same differences can also be stepping stones to higher levels of thinking, which require us to be able to see things from different perspectives and to find fresh connections.

We do so look forward to continuing to explore this with you and we’d love to hear from you.