Diagnosing Bilingual Abilities in the Domain of Literacy Skills

Abstract

Recent research on bilingualism has seen a paradigm shift from a fractional to a holistic view of bilingualism (Grosjean, 1985) according to which all, but not just bilinguals’ weaker language(s) need to be taken into account, which also brought about significant changes with regard to how a bilingual’s linguistic abilities are treated (e.g. inappropriateness of monolingual standards). Yet, this approach has not yet been sufficiently endorsed for biliteracy. In our contribution, we survey different possibilities of diagnosing multilingual abilities of low-literate adults in the domain of literacy skills. Using common experimental procedures to investigate reading performance (visual word recognition, reading fluency) as an example, we demonstrate how they can be adapted to take account of literacy skills in German as L2 and in the respective L1 of low-literate learners (Turkish or Farsi-Dari). Finally, we discuss the potential of combining both the languages within one task type and the utility of modern techniques such as eye tracking to determine how pronounced concurrent orthographic knowledge in a bilingual’s L1 is during literacy-related task execution in their L2.