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

在英国，至少有五分之一的小学生是双语的：他们在两种或两种以上的语言中长大。双语是一种语言、文化和经济资产，但它也给必须与极其多样化的儿童群体打交道的专业人员带来了实际挑战。例如，很难评估双语儿童在学校语言方面的进步是否是由于与单语同龄人相比语言经验有限（例如在家里），或者是否表明有障碍。教师需要知道他们何时可以期望双语儿童“赶上”单语儿童，以便为他们的进步评估提供信息。 儿童语言发展的最强决定因素之一是他们花在听和说语言上的时间。因此，衡量这种语言经验是必不可少的通知教师和言语和语言治疗师（SLT）的期望，关于儿童的学校语言的知识。例如，一个只在学校接触英语的孩子可能不如一个也从父母或兄弟姐妹那里听到英语的孩子熟练。这可能会深刻地影响孩子教育发展的许多方面。研究人员最近开始通过创建父母问卷来解决量化双语语言体验的需求，这些问卷涉及孩子与不同人（父母，兄弟姐妹等）所说的语言，在不同的环境中（家庭、学校等），以及在不同的活动（阅读、看电视等）期间。由于调查问卷是由独立的研究人员团队开发的，因此它们所获得的信息各不相同-有时差异很大，导致研究之间缺乏可比性。有些调查表专门用于研究目的，其长度和复杂性使教师和小班小校难以使用，因为他们往往时间紧迫，而且可能要与社区语言熟练程度低的家长打交道。另一个主要的挑战是家长问卷的完成率通常很低。Q-BEx将为双语语言体验的测量带来一个台阶式的变化。* 这是第一个多学科的努力，以建立一个最佳的衡量双语语言经验的基础上，研究人员，SLT和教育工作者之间的共识，对语言经验的哪些方面进行索引，以及对现有工具的深入审查。* 它将首次提供用户友好的在线问卷（及其相关的后端计算器），以真实的时间返回当前和累积语言经验的测量结果。问卷将以13种语言提供，长度和详细程度各不相同：最短的版本将在家长咨询具有挑战性时有用;最长的版本将产生更精细的测量结果，使SLT和研究人员能够进行深入的调查。* Q-BEx将是第一个利用先进的定量方法来确定问卷细节的正确水平（以满足最终用户的需求），并评估由此产生的测量结果作为语言能力预测指标的可靠性。信度和跨语言效度将使用来自3个不同国家的300名儿童的新数据进行评估。基于此评估，Q-BEx将提供基于证据的指导，以告知用户选择最适合其需求的问卷详细程度。* Q-BEx将开发一种客观的方法，以早期识别那些需要支持的双语儿童与他们的学校语言，从而解决“追赶”的问题。* Q-BEx将通过利用尖端的统计技术，并提供所有脚本以促进复制，为推进双语研究做出贡献。

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.