Issues in the Assessment of Bilinguals

Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole is Professor of Linguistics at Florida International University and until recently acted as Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Theory and Practice at Bangor University. Her research focuses on monolingual and bilingual language acquisition, especially in relation to semantics, morpho-syntax and assessment, and the acquisition of English and Spanish in Spanish-English and Welsh-English bilinguals. Virginia is the Associate Editor of First Language and has been working in the field for over 30 years.

This book discusses key issues surrounding the evaluation of language abilities and proficiency in multilingual speakers. It brings together researchers working on bilingual and multilingual children in a variety of multilingual settings and is essential reading for anyone assessing performance and multilingualism.

1. Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole: Assessment of Multi-Tasking Wonders: Music, Olympics, and Language 2. Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole, Enlli Mon 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 Polisenska, 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. Rocio Perez Tattam, Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole, Feryal Yavas and Hans Stadthagen-Gonzalez: Measuring Grammatical Knowledge and Abilities in Bilinguals: Implications for Assessment and Testing 6. Miguel A. Perez, Cristina Izura, Hans Stadthagen-Gonzalez and Javier Marin: 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