Description
Book SynopsisWith 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.
Trade ReviewVirginia Gathercole knows bilingualism from her own studies as an American in Spain and her long residence in the bilingual communities of South Florida and North Wales. She has also done first-rate studies to understand what development looks like in one and more than one language. So she is the perfect person to bring the two topics together as editor of and major contributor to this wide-ranging volume. Gathercole's incisive intellect and immense practicality shine through every page.
-- Barbara Zurer Pearson, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
To assess the linguistic skills of bilingual children using tests developed with monolinguals can be fundamentally misleading. The new volume edited by Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole exposes this key fact, and provides a many-faceted exploration of ways to address assessment in bilinguals more productively. A volume for everyone interested in bilingualism.
-- D. Kimbrough Oller, The University of Memphis, USA
This edited volume raises an important issue of testing bilinguals in educational settings. The issue is not only theoretical, as the tests in their current form may both hurt bilingual students’ academic opportunities and prevent specialists from noticing language impairments in bilingual children. The volume is of great value for researchers, educators, and education policy makers. It should definitely be used in teachers’ education programs around the world to raise their awareness of multilingualism.
-- Liubov Baladzhaeva, University of Haifa, Israel * the LINGUIST LIST 25.2391 *
Table of Contents1. 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
