Issues in the Assessment of Bilinguals

Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781783090082
• eBook ISBN: 9781783090112
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Educational Policy
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

With growing mass migration across the globe, researchers, practitioners, educators and policy makers are increasingly faced with rising numbers of multilingual children and adults. This volume raises key issues surrounding the evaluation of language abilities and proficiency in multilingual speakers, taking into account the facts concerning the processes of learning, speaking and understanding two languages. Issues in the Assessment of Bilinguals brings together researchers working on bilingual and multilingual children and adults in a variety of multilingual settings: typically developing bilingual children, bilingual and multilingual children and adults found in classrooms, and bilingual children growing up in sociolinguistically fluid bilingual communities – making this an essential volume which raises key issues for anyone assessing performance.

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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 Assessment of Multi-tasking Wonders: Music, Olympics and Language
• 2 Why Assessment Needs to Take Exposure into Account: Vocabulary and Grammatical Abilities in Bilingual Children
• 3 Assessment of Language Abilities in Sequential Bilingual Children: The Potential of Sentence Imitation Tasks
• 4 Assessing Yiddish Plurals in Acquisition: Impacts of Bilingualism
• 5 Measuring Grammatical Knowledge and Abilities in Bilinguals: Implications for Assessment and Testing
• 6 Assessment of Bilinguals’ Performance in Lexical Tasks Using Reaction Times
• 7 Assessment and Instruction in Multilingual Classrooms
• 8 Assessing Multilingual Students’ Writing Skills in Basque, Spanish and English
• 9 Assessment of Academic Performance: The Impact of No Child Left Behind Policies on Bilingual Education: A Ten Year Retrospective
• 10 Summary of Issues Surrounding the Assessment of Bilinguals and the Way Forward to Solutions
• Index of Tests and Measures
• Index of Languages
• Index of Terms