Evaluating the Russian Language Proficiency of Bilingual and Second Language Learners of Russian

Abstract

The starting point of most experimental and clinical examinations of bilingual language development is the choice of the measure of participants’ proficiency, which affects the interpretation of experimental findings and has pedagogical and clinical implications. Recent work on heritage and L2 acquisition of Russian used varying proficiency assessment tools, including elicited production, vocabulary recognition, and in-house measures. Using such different approaches to proficiency assessment is problematic if one seeks a coherent vision of bilingual speaker competence at different acquisition stages. The aim of the present study is to provide a suite of validated bilingual assessment materials designed to evaluate the language proficiency speakers of Russian as a second or heritage language. The materials include an adaptation of a normed language background questionnaire (Leap-Q), a battery of participant-reported proficiency measures, and a normed cloze deletion test. We offer two response formats in combination with two distinct scoring methods in order to make the testing materials suited for bilingual Russian speakers who self-assess as (semi-) proficient as well as for those whose bilingualism is incipient, or declining due to language attrition. Data from 52 baseline speakers and 503 speakers of Russian who reported dominant proficiency in a different language are analyzed for test validation purposes. Obtained measures of internal and external validity provide evidence that the cloze deletion test reported in this study reliably discriminates between dissimilar target language attainment levels in diverse populations of bilingual and multilingual Russian speakers.

What modulates the acquisition of difficult structures in a heritage language? A study on Portuguese in contact with French, German and Italian

“…The authors suggest to take this deficit into account when scoring the test by ignoring pure orthographic errors or considering partially correct answers as correct. When orthographic errors are not considered, cloze-tests turn out as reliable instruments for HL speakers’ language knowledge too (see also Luchkina et al, 2021 for a similar conclusion).…”

“…However, most research on cloze-tests is conducted with adult foreign language learners, who acquired the assessed language in formal instruction settings. The validation of cloze-tests for other types of speakers, such as HL speakers, has been initiated only recently (Drackert & Timukova, 2020; Luchkina, Ionin, Lysenko, Stoops & Suvorkina, 2021). Drackert and Timukova (2020) show that late L2 learners perform better than HL speakers in a cloze-test, mainly because the latter exhibit some deficits in orthographical knowledge (see also Mehlhorn, 2016).…”

Can Heritage Speakers Predict Lexical and Morphosyntactic Information in Reading?

“…However, there are a few studies that used the cloze task, either non-normed or normed with the adult native speakers, as an approximate measure of HSs' proficiency level. These studies report higher performance accuracies of HSs on these tests compared with L2 learners (Luchkina et al 2021) and greater predictive value of the cloze test for the assessment of the grammatical knowledge of HSs (Gor 2019). Thus, there is some initial evidence that literate HSs can generate predictions in heritage language written production.…”

Contrastive focus is acquirable: An investigation of Russian contrastive focus with English/Russian bilinguals

“…The case check test is not discussed here (it was included to examine whether knowledge of case marking is related to knowledge of Russian word order, which was also tested in the AJT; see Ionin et al, 2021). The proficiency test was a multiple-choice cloze test developed and validated by Luchkina et al (2021) (based, in turn, on an earlier fill-in-the-blank cloze test from Luchkina and Stoops, 2013). It consisted of a narrative with 58 blank spaces for missing words, with three response options per blank, only one of which was both grammatical and appropriate given the context.…”

“…The study was implemented using an online Qualtrics survey; participants completed, in order, a consent form, a language background questionnaire, and two prominence detection tasks (a silent reading task followed by a listening task). The bilingual participants also completed the same cloze proficiency task that was used in Experiment 1 (from Luchkina et al, 2021); the cloze test was administered between the two prominence detection tasks. All participants completed the study online, on their own computers.…”