3-114 - Describing and Quantifying “bilingualism” Part 2; the need for consistency and accuracy for research and education

Session Type: Conversation Roundtable

Integrative Statement

The majority of the world’s population is bilingual and we now know that bilingualism affects more than language development. Understanding the challenges and advantages inherent to multilingualism has important applications for education, clinical treatment, and development more generally. Unfortunately, there is a lack of consistency across the research in how bilingualism is quantified and reported. This lack of consistency makes it difficult for comparison across studies, meta-analyses, and the progress of the field. The inconsistency is largely due to the complex social contexts of bilingualism and the inherent dynamic changes of language use over the course of development. Children acquire different languages through different means, for different purposes, and from different people. Bilingual researchers struggle in how to best to describe, for both report and analyses, this complex and dynamic experience.

This Conversation Roundtable is a follow-up discussion from SRCD 2015 and consists of a group of international bilingual scholars from different disciplines (neuroscience, psychology, education, and linguistics) that study bilingualism across contexts and periods of child development. The 2015 discussion succeeded in defining bilingualism, identifying the relevant research contexts and questions the field is addressing, and evaluated measures currently in circulation. The intention is to add to the 2015 conversation and tackle the issue of describing bilingualism in a concise way that will allow comparisons to be made across studies and disciplines. We intend to emerge with a set of guidelines that can be widely disseminated for use across disciplines to best serve the developing child.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Moderator

• Alena G Esposito, Emory University

Panelists

• Gigi Luk, Harvard Graduate School of Education

• Viorica Marian, Northwestern University

• Dina C. Castro, University of North Texas

• Krista Byers-Heinlein, Concordia University