Issues in the Assessment of Bilinguals

by Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller

• ISBN13: 9781783090082
• ISBN10: 1783090081
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2013-10-07
• Publisher: Multilingual Matters

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole is Professor of Linguistics at Florida International University, Professor of Psychology at Bangor University, and until recently acted as Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Theory and Practice at Bangor University. Her research focuses on monolingual and bilingual language acquisition, especially in relation to semantics, morpho-syntax and assessment, and the acquisition of English, Spanish, and Welsh in Spanish-English, Welsh-English, and Spanish-Welsh bilinguals. Professor Gathercole is an Associate Editor of First Language and has been working in the field for over 30 years.

Table of Contents

1. Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole: Assessment of Multi-Tasking Wonders: Music, Olympics, and Language

2. Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole, Enlli Môn Thomas, Emily J. Roberts, Catrin O. Hughes and Emma K. Hughes: Why Assessment Needs to Take Exposure into Account: Vocabulary and Grammatical Abilities in Bilingual Children

3. Shula Chiat, Sharon Armon-Lotem, Theodoros Marinis, Kamila Polišenská, Penny Roy and Belinda Seeff-Gabriel: Assessment of Language Abilities in Sequential Bilingual Children: The Potential of Sentence Imitation Tasks

4. Netta Abugov and Dorit Ravid: Assessing Yiddish Plurals in Acquisition: Impacts of Bilingualism

5. Rocío Pérez Tattam, Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole, Feryal Yavas and Hans Stadthagen-González: Measuring Grammatical Knowledge and Abilities in Bilinguals: Implications for Assessment and Testing

6. Miguel A. Pérez, Cristina Izura, Hans Stadthagen-González and Javier Marín: Assessment of Bilinguals' Performance in Lexical Tasks Using Reaction Times

7. Rebecca Burns: Assessment and Instruction in Multilingual Classrooms

8. Jasone Cenoz, Eli Arozena, Durk Gorter: Assessing Multilingual Students' Writing Skills in Basque, Spanish and English

9. Stephen J. Caldas: Assessment of Academic Performance: The Impact of No Child Left Behind Policies on Bilingual Education: A Ten Year Retrospective

10. Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole: Summary of Issues Surrounding the Assessment of Bilinguals and the Way Forward