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

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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.