Bilingualism is a world-wide phenomenon, featuring a vast amount of diversity. Researchers, educators and clinicians across the world face similar challenges when it comes to estimating how bilingual an individual is. The tools developed by the Q-BEx project are informed by an in-depth review of existing tools and a consensus among researchers, speech & language therapists and educators on what aspects of language experience to index. We have developed a user-friendly, online questionnaire (and back-end calculators) to return measures of current and cumulative language experience in real time, as well as a number of other measures relevant for developing language profiles of bilingual (or trilingual) children. The questionnaire can be customised in many ways to facilitate administration and provide the required level of detail.

The reliability and cross-language validity of this new tool will be assessed using new data from at least 300 children in 3 different countries. Based on this assessment, we will provide evidence-based guidance to inform users’ choice on the level of questionnaire detail most appropriate to their needs.

Exploiting cutting-edge statistical techniques, we will also develop an objective method to identify early those bilingual children in need of support with their school language, helping practitioners estimate when a child who speaks a different language at home can be expected to have “caught up” with their monolingual peers.

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