Quantifying bilingual children’s language experiences with the Q-BEx questionnaire
Dr. Sharon Unsworth
Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
In this talk, I present the results from the international research project Q-BEx ( http://www.q-bex.org) where we developed an online tool for researchers, teachers and clinicians to quantify bilingual children’s language experience. Understanding how bilingual children vary in the extent to which they hear and use their two or more languages is important because such variation has been shown to predict children’s language outcomes, in both school and heritage languages, and family well-being (Paradis, 2023). Informed by a Delphi consensus study (including all stakeholder-groups) and a state-of-art questionnaire review (De Cat et al., 2022; Kašćelan et al., 2022), the Q-BEx tool consists of an online questionnaire that users customize themselves, available in 30 languages, and includes a short, accessible summary for individual children. I will present results from the Q-Bex validation study that we recently conducted among multilingual children between the ages of 4 and 9 in the Netherlands, France and the UK.