ACQ Vol 13 no 3 2011

Cultural diversity

Working with Mandarin- speaking clients Linguistic and cultural considerations Taiying Lee and Elaine Ballard

Immigration patterns in both New Zealand and Australia have changed significantly in the last 20 years with an increase of clients from a Mandarin-speaking background in clinical practice. Working with this population as a clinician can be both challenging and frustrating. In this paper we outline some issues speech pathologists should be aware of in order to make their practice with clients from this background more effective. Our discussion will cover both linguistic and cultural considerations. We conclude with some thoughts on how best to work with this population. I mmigration patterns in both New Zealand and Australia have changed significantly in the last 20 years (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2006; Statistics New Zealand 2006). As a result, speech pathologists in these countries are now working with an increasingly multilingual and multicultural population. Of particular note is the increase of clients from a Mandarin-speaking background in clinical practice. The ethnic Chinese are one of the largest and fastest growing immigrant groups in New Zealand with a 40% increase from the 2001 to the 2006 Census. This is also reflected in the Australian statistics where there has been a 57% increase from 2001 to 2005. From the census as well as our experience of working with families, both clinically and through research, we are aware that most of these families speak Mandarin as their first language, and have a strong commitment to encouraging the maintenance of that language by their children. The children are primarily exposed to Mandarin in the home environment, and have their first exposure to English in early childhood centres and can thus be considered as growing up bilingual. Clinicians face linguistic and cultural challenges when working with this bilingual population. In this paper, we outline some of the issues speech pathologists should be aware of in order to make their practice with clients from a Chinese-English background more effective. Our discussion will be divided into two sections: 1) linguistic issues, and 2) cultural considerations. As our experience of this population is primarily in the area of phonological acquisition, the linguistic section will focus on phonology. The discussion of cultural considerations will, however, have

a wider applicability and is not restricted to any particular type of assessment or intervention. These considerations are furthermore not restricted to Mandarin-speaking immigrants, as they are relevant to any immigrants from a Chinese background. We conclude the paper with some thoughts on how best to work with this population. Linguistic considerations When diagnosing bilingual children for a possible speech sound disorder or delay it is a given that they be assessed in both their languages (Genesee, Paradis, & Crago, 2004; Kohnert, 2007; Zhu & Dodd, 2006). In working with the Mandarin-speaking population, clinicians need some basic background knowledge of Mandarin, in particular its phonology and its differences to English phonology so that they can make informed clinical decisions around assessment, analysis, and therapy. Mandarin Mandarin is the most widely spoken language in the world with 1,023 million speakers globally (Lewis, 2009) and is the native language of approximately 70% of the population in mainland China. In China, Mandarin is commonly known as Putonghua. As the official language of the country it has widespread uses in the mass media and is the language of instruction in schools. Mandarin is also the official language of Taiwan where it is known as Guoyu, and in Hong Kong it shares official language status with English and Cantonese, a southern variety of Chinese. Mandarin is also widely spoken in Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand as well as in overseas Chinese communities in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In assessing children’s ability in Mandarin we have used the Putonghua speech sound assessment developed by Zhu (2002). This assessment is not the only one available (see Putonghua Segmental Phonology Test [So & Zhou, 2000]) but it is readily accessible. The Zhu assessment (2002) is a picture-naming task that targets all of the consonants, vowels, and tones of modern standard Chinese as spoken in China. Below we give a description of Mandarin phonology based on the version used in the assessment. Consonants Mandarin has 22 consonant phonemes (see Table 1). Unlike English, Mandarin does not have a voicing contrast with its obstruents. This is generally not critical for the stops and

Keywords BILINGUALISM CLINICAL CONSIDERATIONS MANDARIN PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT This article has been peer- reviewed

Taiying Lee (top) and Elaine Ballard

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ACQ Volume 13, Number 3 2011

ACQ uiring Knowledge in Speech, Language and Hearing