Exposure to native language questionnaire

Tue Feb 22 16:15:31 UTC 2011

Dear Infochildes,

All these responses about language questionnaires no doubt go way  
beyond what we did in the 1990s at the University of Miami.

I just thought I'd share the one question that we relied on the most  
to give us an estimate of overall language usage.

"Please estimate what percentage of your friends are monolingual in  
<Spanish> ______ , bilingual _________, and monolingual in <English>  
_______.

I put square brackets to show you can swap out the languages, but the  
percentage of friends who were monolingual Spanish speakers was the  
strongest predictor of Spanish use and even proficiency in our college  
age groups.  I think Ginny Gathercole and colleagues' big study of  
language patterns among families in Wales found something similar,  
although perhaps not so strongly stated.  Unfortunately, I can't find  
those data anymore (they were in millions of generations ago lotus  
(!), but it would be interesting if someone could incorporate the  
question again to see if 1) it holds elsewhere, and 2) to support and  
quantify it.

Best wishes,
Barbara

On Feb 22, 2011, at 11:02 AM, Sharon Unsworth wrote:

> Dear Pascale,
>
> I have also recently developed a questionnaire (based in part on work
> by Johanne Paradis and on Guitérrez-Clellen & Kreiter (2003), amongst
> others) which you can use to collect language background/use data and
> using an accompanying Excel file, automatically calculate current and
> past (cumulative) exposure as well as current quality of exposure. I'm
> currently working on some final revisions to this but I'd be more than
> happy to share it with you once these are complete (probably within
> the next few weeks).
>
> Best wishes, Sharon
>
> --
> Dr. Sharon Unsworth  |  http://www.let.uu.nl/~Sharon.Unsworth/ 
> personal/
>
> Utrecht institute of Linguistics & Department of Modern Languages
> Postal address: Trans 10, 3512JK Utrecht, tel. +31 30 2531729
> Office: Room 2.38, Trans 4
>
> On Feb 20, 11:45 pm, Natalia Gagarina <gagar... at zas.gwz-berlin.de>
> wrote:
>>   Dear Pascale,
>>
>> One more reference to native language questionnaire that we had
>> developed in the Center for General Linguistics (ZAS) might be of
>> interest for you. This questionnaire is a part of the Russian  
>> language
>> proficiency test (Gagarina, N., Klassert, A., Topaj, N., 2010, ZAS
>> Papers in Lingsuitics) and it targets the social and cultural
>> peculiarities of the Russian-speaking immigrant children.
>>
>> Kind regards,
>> Natalia Gagarina
>>
>> Am 18.02.2011 09:51, schrieb Pascale Engel:
>>
>>
>>
>>> Dear Info ï¿½ CHILDES,
>>
>>> I am running a study in the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg involving
>>> bilingual Portuguese speaking immigrant children. I am particularly
>>> interested to know whether the amount and/or the quality of the
>>> exposure to the native language in the home affects a) children's
>>> performance in their first language Portuguese and b) childrenï¿½s
>>> performance in their second language Luxembourgish.
>>
>>> Ideally I would like to use some sort of questionnaire that I could
>>> give to parents to get an idea of the amount and the quality of
>>> exposure to the native language in the home. I am not aware of any
>>> existing questionnaire but before designing something from scratch I
>>> thought I would ask the Group for some feed-back. Any suggestions  
>>> are
>>> greatly appreciated.
>>
>>> Many thanks in advance
>>
>>> ---------------------------------------
>>> Pascale Engel de Abreu - PhD
>>
>>> Postdoctoral Research Fellow
>>> University of Luxembourg - EMACS
>>> B.P.2 L-7201 Walferdange
>>> G.D. de Luxembourg
>>
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************************************************
Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph.D.
Research Associate, Depts of Linguistics and   Communication Disorders
c/o 226 South College
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst MA 01003

bpearson at research.umass.edu
http://www.umass.edu/aae/bp_indexold.htm
http://www.zurer.com/pearson/bilingualchild

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