Mother tongue or non‐native language? Learning from conversations with bilingual/multilingual therapists about working with clients who do not share their native language

Abstract

Many people accessing services, including counselling services, do not speak the official language of the country in which they find themselves. This paper first considers, in general terms, the way that language is used to negotiate relationships and to structure and provide meaning for our experiences, needs, feelings and ideas. This is then related to the use of native language in therapeutic work and the practical issues that this can present for services.The paper then reports on a small‐scale informal piece of research that was conducted in 2009 by Mothertongue multi‐ethnic counselling and listening service with six bilingual and multilingual counsellors, none of whom were native English speakers. The aim was to explore what might be learned from their experience of living with more than one language and then to apply this to the task of communicating in English with non‐English speakers in the therapeutic relationship.Some practical observations and suggestions are included in this paper. These incorporate the themes that emerged from the research such as: attending to clients' linguistic history; the way in which emotions are expressed in different languages; how speaking more than one language impacts on identity formation and the ability to understand across languages and culture; how we convey and construe significance and meaning; how we relate to people's experiences of learning a language. The author of this paper hopes that these findings and observations will stimulate further conversations on this topic.

Citation

Costa, B. (2010), "Mother tongue or non‐native language? Learning from conversations with bilingual/multilingual therapists about working with clients who do not share their native language", Ethnicity and Inequalities in Health and Social Care, Vol. 3 No. 1, pp. 15-24. https://doi.org/10.5042/eihsc.2010.0144