Documenting Children’s Bilingual Language Experiences at Home and the Early Education Setting

• In Event: 1-098 - Describing and Quantifying “Bilingualism” Part 3; the Need for Consistency and Accuracy for Research and Education

Integrative Statement

The changing demographics in the World driven mostly by migration movements have meant that child development research is increasingly including children who are growing up bilingually. Major methodological challenges exist in research that includes bilingual children, one is the inconsistency in the definition of bilingual children, and the sources of information used to determine bilingual status, along with the very limited information about these children and their families (Castro, 2014). The inconsistency in the definition of bilingual children in research studies makes it difficult to interpret and generalize findings to all bilingual children. For example, some studies define bilingual participants by their language or ethnic group (i.e., Spanish speaker, Asian-American) or their immigration status, which does not give information about the type and degree of bilingualism of study participants. For example, information about exposure to and use of each of their two languages, and age of acquisition can help determine if a child is a sequential or simultaneous bilingual. Understanding contextual factors can also help in the interpretation of research findings when studying bilingual children’s development, knowing that family, community and school environments can be different and be experienced in a different way by bilinguals when compared to the experiences of monolinguals. Understanding the urgency to address these methodological challenges for the advancement of research on the development of bilingual children, researchers involved with the Center for Early Care and Education Research-Dual Language Learners (CECER-DLL) developed a parent and a teacher questionnaire. The rationale behind was to provide the field with a tool to help document de characteristics and experiences of bilingual children, contributing to the consistency across samples that would facilitate comparisons of findings across studies.

This paper presentation will describe and discuss the process in the development of these questionnaires. The creation of these tools began with the review of questions related to bilingual children’s developmental characteristics and contextual factors from existing surveys used in national studies such as the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey-Birth Cohort, and other large scale studies of young bilingual children. The CECER-DLL Family Questionnaire consists of 88 items designed to gather information about family demographics, including generational status, family SES, also it includes items on language proficiency and usage by adults and children in the household, and language and literacy practices of parents and children in the home . It also gathers information about the child’s preschool and childcare language experiences. The CECER-DLL Teacher/ Provider Questionnaire consists of 57 questions about the teacher demographics, education and training; demographics of the classroom; languages used in the classroom by teachers, assistants, and children; teachers’ beliefs and attitudes about bilingual learners and bilingualism; and teachers’ level of preparation to effectively serve bilingual children.

Authors

• Dina C Castro, University of North Texas
  Presenting Author

• Carol Scheffner Hammer, Columbia University
  Non-Presenting Author