Issues in the Assessment of Bilinguals

Preface and Acknowledgments

The purpose of these volumes is to raise awareness of the issues involved in the assessment of bilingual children and adults, to suggest potential solutions, and to identify both theoretical and practical ways of approaching those issues in an informed, evidence-based manner. These volumes arise out of multiple links across the globe between researchers working with bilinguals from a variety of standpoints – theoreticians, clinicians, speech practitioners and educators. Many of these interactions were fostered in recent years by conferences sponsored by the ESRC Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Theory and Practice at Bangor University, its visiting researcher program, and other similar support.

Many people have assisted in various capacities in the preparation of this work. This includes participants at a workshop on the assessment of bilinguals at Gregynog, Wales, and the reviewers of these chapters, whose expert advice and insightful feedback helped to shape these works. In particular, beyond the authors of the chapters themselves (some of whom also acted in a reviewing capacity), I wish to thank the following reviewers and members of the Centre: Fraibet Aveledo, Isabelle Barriere, Dermot Bergin, Marketa Caravolas, Angela Fawcett, Tess Fitzpatrick, Bryn Jones, Rhonwen Jones, Manuela Julien, Debbie Mills, Simona Montanari, Betty Mousikou, María Carmen Parafita Couto, Ann Rivera, Seren Roberts, Kathryn Sharp, Elin Thordardottir and Mari Williams. Thank you also to an anonymous reviewer of the books here – your helpful comments and advice have served to strengthen and improve the volumes immensely. I am also very grateful to Kleanthes Grohmann for his generous help with technical computer issues.

A special thanks goes as well to Professor Margaret Deuchar, the Director of the Centre, whose wholehearted support, both moral and financial, has helped to ensure the success of this endeavor. I also wish to express my gratitude to Professor Colin Baker, whose unending encouragement for the volumes and the research in them is greatly appreciated, and to Dr James Sutton at FIU, who provided invaluable support in the final stages of preparation of these volumes.

A great debt of gratitude also is owed to the members of my research teams: First, my group in the Centre, who have been integral to the success of our work in the Centre over the last five years. Thank you to Rocío PérezTattam, Hans Stadthagen-González, Enlli Môn Thomas and Kathryn Sharp. I also wish to thank researchers who have helped on several projects that have contributed to our work on assessment – in particular, Emma K. Hughes, Emily J. Roberts and Catrin O. Hughes, and two graduate students at FIU, Emily Byers and Erica Verde, who assisted in the preparation of the indices for the volumes.

I wish also to recognize the funding bodies who have helped to make this work possible. This work was supported in part by the following grants: ESRC and WAG/HEFCW RES-535-30-0061: ESRC Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Theory and Practice (2007–2012); Welsh Assembly Government: Standardized measures for the assessment of Welsh (2006-09), Continued development of standardized measures for the assessment of Welsh (2009-2012); ESRC RES-062-23-0175: Cognitive effects of bilingualism across the lifespan (2006-2012); and a conference grant from Gregynog, Wales. Without their support, none of this work would be possible.

Finally, the work here has profited greatly from discussions and collaborations arising from meetings of the Seminar Group ‘Assessment of children from a bi- or multilingual context at risk for language impairment’, headed by Carolyn Letts and Ghada Khattab, with members from all over the UK and from Europe, and funded by the ESRC Res-451-26-0707.

1   Assessment of Multi-tasking Wonders: Music, Olympics and Language

Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole

You don’t get harmony when everybody sings the same note.

Doug Floyd (Guthrie, 2003: 41)

Imagine a world in which we saw beyond the lines that divide us, and celebrated our differences, instead of hiding from them.

Wesley Clark, speech, Jan. 20, 2004

(from http://www.notable-quotes.com/d/differences_quotes.html)

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Henry David Thoreau

(from http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~ mccolm/Dquotes.html)

These volumes address an expanding area of interest and concern in the 21st century – the assessment of bilingual speakers, both adults and children. There is a rapidly growing body of research and proposals concerning the issues surrounding the evaluation of language abilities and proficiency in multilingual speakers, and, by extension, the evaluation of any cognitive or academic abilities in such speakers. Bilingual speakers’ acquisition and knowledge of their two languages are necessarily different from acquisition and knowledge of a single language. This has ramifications for how bilingual speakers perform in a variety of tasks. If we wish to gain accurate evaluations of bilingual children’s and adults’ proficiency and abilities, we must necessarily take into account facts concerning the processes of learning, speaking, and understanding two languages. The authors in these volumes explore issues and solutions for the assessment of bilinguals. The research here comes from a variety of particular bilingual populations from around the world. The concerns expressed and the proposed solutions are relevant and applicable to bilingual populations everywhere.

Introduction

Some accomplishments in life are so remarkable that we glory in them and celebrate them. For example, we are in awe of people who show excellence in more than one aspect of a given talent at the same time. Some obvious examples come from the fields of music and athletics. We have great admiration for musicians such as Stevie Wonder, who not only wrote, produced, arranged and sang ‘Superstition’, but also played the drum, the clavinet, and the Moog bass synthesizer for it. We applaud the accomplishments of composers such as Georg Telleman, who played multiple instruments – violin, viola da gamba, recorder, flauto traverso, oboe, shawm, sackbut and double bass – and Paul McCartney, who plays the guitar, bass guitar, piano, harmonica, recorder, banjo, mandolin and drums.

We are equally awed by athletes that excel in not only one sport but two or three. Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play in major league baseball (for the Dodgers), had an illustrious career in baseball (e.g. winning the MVP award in 1949), but he also excelled in football, track and basketball while he was enrolled at UCLA (see http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-multi-sport-athletes.php#ixzz1rjaZWaIf). Jim Thorpe won gold medals in the pentathlon and the decathlon in the 1912 Olympics, and then he went on to play baseball for the New York Giants, the Brewers and the White Sox. He also played professional football and professional basketball (http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-multi-sport-athletes.php#ixzz1rjaZWaIf). We rightly applaud such multi-accomplishing individuals. It never crosses our minds that playing the drums in addition to the guitar might detract from the musician’s accomplishments on the guitar, or that the athlete who excels in two sports might be inferior to someone who excels in only one of those sports.

We sometimes celebrate similar accomplishments in relation to language. We find it a surprise – but a delightful surprise – that Jodie Foster speaks fluent French in addition to English (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3TvLSvvKMc&feature=player_embedded); that Salma Hayek speaks Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic; that Charlize Theron speaks Afrikaans natively (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fYB9s0Nyzk&feature=player_embedded); that Natalie Portman speaks Hebrew (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPDArBZrz8&feature=player_embedded); that Sandra Bullock speaks fluent German (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s10x38SMb-g&feature=player_embedded); and that Gwyneth Paltrow speaks Spanish fluently.

The majority of the world’s population are just like these celebrities – they speak more than one language, and they often do so fluently. But somehow the delight and awe we experience in relation to celebrities who we discover are bilingual sometimes gets diminished or turned to caution in relation to others who are bilingual, especially in relation to children who are growing up bilingually. Why might this be? It probably boils down to two things: the important role that language plays in all aspects of our lives, combined with fear associated with a lack of knowledge about how bilingual language develops.

The way in which we view the multi-tasking accomplishments and evaluate the abilities of such multi-tasking persons hinges in large part on our appreciation of the steps one takes towards those accomplishments. Although we readily acknowledge those steps in the cases of musical and athletic advances, the steps in relation to language are perhaps more covert and less well understood. As we gain a fuller understanding of what it means to be a child growing up as a bilingual or an adult who has become bilingual, our understanding of how assessments of such individuals need to take those facts into consideration is also growing.

Step by Step

We tend to forget that people who end up being fluent bilinguals do not, of course, start out as fluent bilinguals – just as competent multi-instrumentalists or athletes who excel in multiple sports do not start life at the top of their art or their game. Everyone has to start from scratch. This means that budding musicians, athletes, and language learners all must go through multiple stages on the path towards coming to full mastery of their art. Those multiple stages involve multiple steps and periods when performance appears less than optimal. The emergent musician, athlete and language learner alike must, as a natural course of events, pass through moments at which errors are made and during which the prognosis for the ultimate success of the endeavor may seem uncertain.

To help the budding musician, athlete, or language learner and to gauge the level of his or her progress, we have ways of assessing whether that progress is commensurate with expectations, or whether, at points along the way, an emergent musician, athlete or language learner may need a little extra assistance along the way. There are exams and competitions children undergo in each of these realms, exams and competitions that entail expectations at a level that is determined by our knowledge of how similar children or learners at similar stages of development have been able to perform. Knowledge of that normal level of progress at each stage is determined by years, even centuries, of experience of observing thousands upon thousands of children passing through similar stages. For musicians, norms for such expectations are used in tests for performance at local, national, or international levels; for athletes, there are meets and competitions such as the Olympics; for language learners, there are tests of language abilities, especially in relation to reading and writing (and of related skills such as spelling), but also for oral language understanding, vocabulary knowledge and grammatical knowledge.

Tests related to musical and athletic prowess are usually not mandatory for every child passing through a certain age group or school level. Acquisition of these skills is seen as optional, and we tend to have the attitude that excellence in them involves specialist endeavors. So an inability to perform in either realm is not usually considered detrimental to a child’s overall development, nor to have implications for any prognosis concerning their overall success in the future or as human beings.

With tests for language and language-related abilities (e.g. literacy), in contrast, the situation is quite different. All children are expected to achieve certain levels with language, and we take steps to assess their proficiency at multiple points in development. This universal testing of language occurs because of the fundamental nature of language as a key foundation on which success in a variety of areas that go well beyond language itself is built. Linguistic abilities are essential to academic success in all content areas, including not only those directly related to language (reading, writing), but also those that initially might appear to be independent of language, such as mathematical abilities. Unlike for musical talent or athletic abilities, therefore, there are high stakes associated with language abilities, as other successes appear contingent on a firm language base, which in turn is often taken as predictive of future potential in a variety of areas.

One consequence of this is that any evidence of possible difficulties with language are taken quite seriously by both parents and professionals, and any problems seem to be worthy of fairly prompt attention. For this reason, we assess children’s language abilities very early on, and we continue to do so throughout a person’s educational career. If a very young child does not appear to be talking when his or her peers are, a parent might take that child to a professional for consultation, to determine whether there are any major difficulties the child is having with language. When children enter school, they undergo tests related to reading readiness. Then throughout school, language and reading and writing assessments are key components of the assessment of a child’s progress. Furthermore, when a child or adult begins to learn a language other than the first language, teachers administer tests to determine that person’s progress in the second language.

Expectations

As noted, all of those assessments – whether for music, athletics, or language – involve underlying assumptions or evidence on realistic expectations for how a child or student should perform – given his or her age, level, and experience. For example, a 4-year-old Suzuki violin player might be credited with an excellent performance for being able to play ‘Twinkle Twinkle’ on his/her violin. No one would expect that 4-year-old to be able to play Brahms’ violin concerto, nor consider that child deficient for not being able to do so. Similarly, a 4-year-old in a tumbling class might be rewarded with gold stars for making several somersaults in a row. Again, no one would expect that child to be able to perform a back flip like Aston Merrygold of JLS can.

In the area of language, a Kindergartner who is able to read at least a few words might be lavishly praised. No one would expect that Kindergartner to be able to read a text from Shakespeare or would test him or her on the understanding of a passage from Hamlet. (At the same time, if the same assessor or teacher is presented with a high school student who cannot read more than a few words, s/he might well be concerned and would consider whether such a student was in need of extra support.)

Children growing up as bilinguals

The realistic expectations we use to evaluate performance in any of these realms come from experiences with similar children or students at similar levels along the way toward gaining mastery of the skills. The present books are about what those realistic expectations might be for children growing up as bilinguals, and how we apply those realistic expectations in assessing performance. What might we expect at various stages in a bilingual child’s or adult’s progress in language? How can one tell whether a bilingual child is developing as might be expected, given his or her age, level and experience with the two languages, and how can we tell whether those expectations are or are not being met?

The educational and professional communities whose job it is to assess children’s development have a good sense, and a long history of understanding, of how development occurs in monolingual children. The vast majority of the standardized tests for language have been developed with monolingual children or adults in mind (unless they are specifically designed to see if second-language learners have developed a command of their second language – e.g. the TOEFL (http://www.ets.org/toefl/). Typical examples are receptive vocabulary tests like the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Dunn & Dunn, 2007) and the British Picture Vocabulary Scales (Dunn et al., 1997). These provide information on the normal expectations one might have for monolingual children learning English in America or in the UK. (Note, however, that the BPVS now provides bilingual norms in addition to the monolingual norms.) Scales such as the Communicative Development Inventories (Fenson et al., 2007) have largely culled data from a large number of (usually monolingual) children learning the given language to allow the assessment of other children learning the same language. And standardized college placement tests such as the SAT (http://sat.collegeboard.org/home?affiliate Id=nav&bannerId=h-satb) and the ACT (http://www.act.org/aap/) rely heavily on one’s knowledge of the vocabulary and grammar of the language being tested, English. For example, the passage-based reading and sentence completion components on the SAT (see http://sat.collegeboard.org/practice/sat-practice-questions) require a knowledge of highly sophisticated vocabulary for accurate performance.

But we know that bilinguals’ language development and their knowledge of their two languages is not the same as those of monolinguals (Cummins, 1981; Grosjean, 1982). This is because, first, bilingual children are hearing two languages, often in distinct social settings (e.g. maybe one language with grandparents, the other language at the preschool), and often with less cumulative exposure to each language than a monolingual child who speaks either language at the given age. At the same time bilingual children are experiencing some overlap in what they are learning about each language (e.g. learning two names for the same referent – apple and manzana – or two ways of talking about an action – he ran away and salió), and even some overlap of use in the same conversations, with code-switching common among bilinguals.

The unique ways in which bilingual or multilingual children experience language affects many aspects of development and the ultimate knowledge attained. This means that the timing of development can be different from that of monolinguals, that what they know in each language can be different and complementary (e.g. they might know the word for apples in one language, but not the other), that what they attend to may be different because of the ‘packaging’ of concepts in the two languages, and that their ultimate organization of the two languages will be different from the organization of either language in the respective monolinguals, with potential links between the two languages at multiple levels.

In addition, there can be important differences across bilingual children: Most importantly, the relative timing for when children begin each of their languages, or are exposed to each language (simultaneously from birth; beginning the second language a little later than the first, early in their preschool years; only beginning the second language on entry to school; or even beginning the second language later in life; and so on), matters for what course we might expect their language development to take. If both languages are developing simultaneously, the child’s knowledge of the two languages may be relatively ‘balanced’, whereas if one language is begun after the first is already somewhat established, the latter may remain ‘dominant’ for some time, until the exposure to the second language has become more extensive.

Because language tests are designed to give some indication of whether a child is developing according to our expectations relative to a child’s or speak-er’s age, level and experience, it is not really appropriate to apply a measure that was designed for one purpose (i.e. to gauge whether realistic expectations have been met for the course and timing of development in children who have been exposed to only one language) to use for a distinct purpose (i.e. to assess language development in children who have been exposed to two or more languages). This is true whether one simply wishes to know how well the child commands this language or one wishes to judge the child’s overall linguistic abilities. In the former case, it would be uninstructive, for example, to use a measure designed for someone who has had, say, five years’ experience learning the language with someone who has had only one or two years’ experience.

But worse is the latter situation. When one wishes to determine, not only how much of language X a given child knows, but, more globally, whether a child is having particular difficulties with learning language per se, the importance of the language status of a child (monolingual vs bilingual) becomes heightened. Performing poorly on a second language (or on only one of a child’s two languages) is not the same as having a systemic problem with learning language – just as the multi-instrumentalist’s abilities in music cannot be totally gauged by only observing him or her playing the drums, or the athletic abilities of a child who has been playing baseball for four or five years and has just now begun track cannot be judged by observing his/her perform ance in track alone. To gain a full picture of a child’s language abilities, the ideal would be to examine performance in both languages of the bilingual child to determine if there is a linguistic problem. If the child is performing up to expectations in one of the languages and not the other, that indicates that there is not a problem with learning language per se, just that the child is behind with a particular language. This is a critical distinction to make. An impairment that affects a child’s abilities to learn language should affect both (or all) languages the child is trying to speak.

Goals of these Volumes

The chapters in these volumes attempt to tease apart some of the multi-faceted issues related to obtaining information on or determining the best ways of assessing bilingual children’s and adults’ abilities. The questions addressed include the following:

(a)   What are the normal expectations regarding patterns of development in bilingual children?

(b)   What are the normal expectations regarding ultimate linguistic abilities in bilingual populations and the roles of home language experience and community language in arriving at the mature command of the language?

(c)   Is it important to assess both (all) of a child’s languages?

(d)   What is the best way to determine if a bilingual child has language impairment – LI or SLI?

(e)   How does a professional assess language abilities in an individual if the assessor does not know the language(s) in question?

(f)   How do we gauge development in a language for which no normed tests exist?

(g)   Should tests be normed specifically for bilinguals?

(h)   Are there potential universal means of assessing language abilities in bilinguals from distinct language populations?

(i)   What effect is there on bilingual language acquisition when there is highly variable input?

(j)   What sociolinguistic influences can affect bilingual language acquisition?

(k)   How can we best deal with the assessment of language abilities in school children for whom the community or school language is an L2 or for children from a multitude of different language(s) spoken in the home?

(l)   Are there strategies teachers can use to help improve students’ acquisition of an early or later L2?

(m)   Are there strategies teachers can use to build bridges between a child’s home language and the language of instruction?

(n)   What are the ultimate ramifications of educational policy on language instruction and on the use of the heritage language versus the school language?

These questions run through the chapters in the two volumes and are addressed from the perspective of the experiences of researchers and professionals working with a variety of populations around the world. This volume raises many of the ISSUES related to the assessment of bilinguals; volume 2 presents some SOLUTIONS.

Issues

Each of the chapters in this volume raises important issues that relate to assessment and constitute the basic motivation behind the search for any solutions that may be proposed for the assessment of bilinguals, addressed in volume 2, Solutions for the Assessment of Bilinguals. These underlying issues are at the heart of why improvements are needed in the forms and nature of assessments we apply to bilingual infants, children and adults – whether for the identification of language impairments; for children’s progress, either in language or beyond language, in education; for L2-learners’ abilities in childhood or adulthood; for general academic performance.

The issues raised in this volume are as follows.

(1)   The first issue to be raised, in ‘Why Assessment Needs to Take Exposure into Account: Vocabulary and Grammatical Abilities in Bilingual Children’, by Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole, Enlli Môn Thomas, Emily J. Roberts and Catrin Hughes, is as follows:

Issue 1: Normed assessments of language proficiency in children are in most cases normed on monolingually developing children. Such assessments, without norms specifically based on bilingually developing children, misrepresent the linguistic abilities of bilingual children. Assessments are needed that take into account bilingual children’s level of exposure to the language in question.

Normed vocabulary and grammar tests are commonly used to assess children’s language abilities, and, often by extension, conceptual abilities. Such assessments aim to determine whether a child is progressing in line with expectations, as determined by the performance of a large group of similar children, the norming sample. However, those samples often involve monolingual children, and the assumption that bilingual children develop in a similar fashion to monolingual children is unwarranted.

The normal course of development of vocabulary and grammar in bilingual children, and the influence of exposure are examined in relation to Welsh-English bilingual children aged 2 to 15. The chapter traces the effects of exposure on timing of development. The data support the position that initially timing of development is linked to amount of exposure, but that eventually, greater parity is achieved across groups.

Furthermore, the data are examined for evidence of crossover links, or carryover from one language to the other, especially in relation to grammatical knowledge. The authors examine children’s performance on receptive tests of 13 types of grammatical structures in their two languages, Welsh and English. On the whole, the evidence is against carryover from one language to the other, at least on a linguistic level. Any links that can be observed appear to be attributable to links on another level, perhaps cognitive, perhaps meta-cognitive, perhaps meta-linguistic.

In addition, the ramifications for such data for assessment are discussed. The model followed by the Prawf Geirfa Cymraeg (Gathercole & Thomas, 2007; Gathercole et al., in press) is advocated. In this model, bilingual children’s performance is measured against two standards of comparison – first, relative to all children from their age range, and, second, relative to children from a similar home language background, with a similar level of exposure. Each child receives two standard scores under this model – the scores together provide a comprehensive picture of the child’s abilities in relation both to the language in question and in relation to legitimate expectations, given the child’s level of exposure to the language.

(2)   A second issue is addressed in ‘Assessment of Language Abilities in Sequential Bilingual Children: The Potential of Sentence Imitation Tasks’, by Shula Chiat, Sharon Armon-Lotem, Theodoros Marinis, Kamila Polišenská, Penny Roy and Belinda Seeff-Gabriel. The issue they raise is as follows:

Issue 2: Given the patterns of development in bilingual children, how is it possible for speech therapists to assess language abilities and identify language impairments or language deficits in bilingual children? This is an especially intractable issue when assessments are not available in the child’s L1 (and when, often, the assessor does not speak that L1).

Given that bilingual children’s abilities develop at a distinct pace from those of monolingual children, one cannot simply use tests designed for monolingual children to determine the language abilities (or deficits) of children who speak an L2. Low performance by the bilingual child in the L2 may reflect limited exposure to the L2, not a developmental deficit. So what is needed is some way of testing children that can reveal language abilities but does not require that the child have extensive exposure to the language being tested.

The ideal might be to test children in their L1. But