Does anybody knows any strict criteria for bilingualism or scale which I could use in order to assess who is bilingual? I need some tool that does not assess some particular language fluency with the use of language proficiency test.
I know only one which is close to what I am looking for - Bilingual Dominance Scale, but it puts emphasis on dominance - so the comparison between two languages. I do not want to compare these two but try to assess it somehow separately - without getting into the assessment with use of language tests.
I would be grateful for any help!
I also think that it makes sense to develop a questionnaire yourself based on previous research and your own idea about who is bilingual. A language background questionnaire that might help is the one developed Gullberg and Indefrey (2003) from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Its main focus is assessing the language background/history of multilinguals. Maybe some of the questions could be of use (or an inspiration) for your own questionnaire.
The questionnaire can be downloaded (see link).
http://www.mpi.nl/departments/other-research/research-projects/the-dynamics-of-multilingual-processing/tools/
Bilingualism is a shifting goal. In my opinion, a qualitative research is more valuable in terms of understanding whether someone is truly bilingual than using objective measurement tools, which may not be applicable in a certain circumstance. What a quantitative indicators can only measure functional bilingualism. In brief, the manifestation of bilingualism is translation or interpretation from one language to another and vice versa. Why not try case study?
I very much agree with Kristin Lemhöfer's point about using the European scales. I have a thought to add to that. You could do a series of, say, 3 category fluency tasks (name all the animals you know in 60 seconds, for example, plus two more categories), and use that number of words averaged over the three categories, regardless of language. A verbal fluency task (name all the words you know beginning with the letter 'b') would not work so well across language I guess. Both systems have been used to as a tool to judge language proficiency in a lot of studies, although rarely alone. Mightbe helpful, if not too late.
Thank all of you! We've already used tools we found to assess bilingualism but your advices were very helpful during that process
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