Quantifying bilingual experience (Q-BEx): optimising tools for educators, clinicians and researchers

At least a fifth of primary school children in the UK are bilingual: they grow up with two or more languages. Bilingualism is a linguistic, cultural and economic asset, but it also poses practical challenges for professionals having to deal with an extremely diverse group of children. For instance, it is difficult to evaluate whether a bilingual child's progress in the school language is due to limited language experience (e.g. at home) compared with monolingual peers, or whether it indicates a disorder. Teachers need to know when they can expect bilingual children to have "caught up" with monolinguals in order to inform their assessment of their progress.

One of the strongest determinants of children's language development is the amount of time they spend hearing and speaking the language. Measuring this language experience is therefore essential to inform the expectations of teachers and speech and language therapists (SLTs) regarding children's knowledge of the school language. For example, a child who is only exposed to English at school is likely to be less proficient than a child who also hears English from a parent or siblings. This can profoundly affect many aspects of that child's educational development.

Researchers have recently started to address the need to quantify the bilingual language experience through the creation of parental questionnaires about the languages spoken to and by the child with different people (parents, siblings, etc.), in different settings (home, school, etc.), and during different activities (reading, watching TV, etc.). Because the questionnaires have been developed by independent teams of researchers, the information they elicit varies - sometimes substantially, resulting in a lack of comparability across studies. Some questionnaires have been used exclusively for research purposes and their length and complexity make them difficult to use by teachers and SLTs, who are often pressed for time and may deal with parents with low levels of proficiency in the community language. Another major challenge is the typically low completion rates of parental questionnaires.

Q-BEx will bring a step-change in the measurement of bilingual language experience.

* It is the first, multidisciplinary endeavour to establish an optimal metric of bilingual language experience based on a consensus among researchers, SLTs and educators on what aspects of language experience to index, as well as an in-depth review of existing tools.

* It will for the first time deliver user-friendly, online questionnaires (and their associated back-end calculators) to return measures of current and cumulative language experience in real time. The questionnaires will be available in 13 languages, and vary in length and level of detail: the shortest version will be useful when parental consultation is challenging; the longest version will yield more fine-grained measures to enable SLTs and researchers to carry out in-depth enquiries.

* Q-BEx will be the first to exploit advanced quantitative methods to identify the right level of questionnaire detail (to meet the needs of end-users) and to assess the reliability of the resulting measures as predictors of language proficiency. Reliability and cross-language validity will be assessed using new data from 300 children in 3 different countries. Based on this assessment, Q-BEx will provide evidence-based guidance to inform users' choice on the level of questionnaire detail most appropriate to their needs.

* Q-BEx will develop an objective method to identify early those bilingual children in need of support with their school language, thereby addressing the "catch up" question.

* Q-BEx will contribute to advancing bilingualism research by exploiting cutting-edge statistical techniques, and making all scripts available to facilitate replication.

*IMPACT DELIVERABLES:

Q-BEx will
1. develop user-friendly online calculators to measure bilingual children's current and cumulative experience in each language, for teachers and speech and language therapists (SLTs) to use when creating a language profile of the children in their care;
2. create questionnaires to collect data on bilingual children's exposure and use of each language, to be used in conjunction with the online calculators. The questionnaires will be graded in detail and translated in twelve of the most frequent additional languages in Western Europe and North America;
3. provide reliability assessment of the calculators' output as predictor of language proficiency based on new data from 300 children;
4. develop an objective method that uses the relationship between language exposure and proficiency to identify early those bilingual children in need of support with their school language, thereby addressing the "catch up" question.

*IMPACT BENEFICIARIES:

The principal beneficiaries of the impact goals are teachers and SLTs in the UK, the Netherlands, and France. Representatives from the two non-academic stakeholder groups (teachers and SLTs) have been consulted on the appropriateness and relevance of the objectives and deliverables. An initial online survey between March and December 2017 (https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/D7Y8JSJ) targeting practitioners who routinely need to assess bilingual children has revealed that only 2% (out of 131) are satisfied with the tools and guidance at their disposal to assess bilingual children. Their concerns about the language assessment of bilingual children have fed directly into this proposal. Continued engagement with these groups will be essential to the success of Q-BEx.

Teachers will directly benefit from a tool to better understand the linguistic background of the bilingual children in their classroom. In England and Wales teachers have to comply with a newly introduced assessment scheme introduced by the Department for Education in 2016: Stages of Proficiency. The aim is to gather a better picture of the linguistic strengths of children with English as an Additional Language and to monitor their progress. Conducting the assessment in conjunction with information on children's cumulative and current language exposure will provide a more holistic picture of the child's bilingual profile, and will allow teachers to make predictions about children's longitudinal linguistic trajectories.
In the first instance teachers will be contacted through their national professional associations (NALDIC in the UK: https://naldic.org.uk) for the purpose of stakeholder involvement and for taking part in knowledge transfer activities. Serratrice (Co-I) has established links with a number of NALDIC Regional Interest Groups across England through the Institute of Education at the University of Reading and through Bilingualism Matters@Reading.

SLTs need help with the holistic assessment of bilingual children in two languages as recommended by the RCSLT. There is currently no approved protocol to take a case history including details on the child's exposure to their two (or more) languages. Data from our scoping survey suggest that SLTs would welcome more practical guidance on what to include in the parental interview that would allow them to build a more comprehensive picture of how children are exposed and use their two languages.
SLTs will be contacted via the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT). Serratrice (Co-I) has strong connections with the RCLST through previous collaborations (e.g. reviewing the RCLST's guidance for Gaelic speakers in 2015; reviewing the RCSLT's guidance on assessment and intervention with bilingual speakers), and through the SLT programme at the University of Reading where she currently teaches.