Operationalising Academic Language Proficiency in Bilingualism Research

Abstract

Since minority languages are used mainly in the home and in the minority-language community,there are limited opportunities to develop register aspects of literacy which develop through schooling. This means that minority language maintenance often becomes problematic in the area of linguistic aspects of literacy,discussed here in terms of academic register. Given the limited opportunities, it is important to discover the extent to which academic register develops in minority-language children. To do so, we need first to describe the academic register of the minority-language, and then to develop instruments to measure its development. This paper looks at the means that we developed to accomplish these two tasks of description and instrument development, in a study of Spanish-English biliteracy in Australia. The task of description was performed by comparing school textbooks from early primary and mid-secondary schooling. The task of instrumentation was accomplished by developing register-sensitive multiple-choice cloze tests.