Effects of Culture and Bilingualism in Linguistic Assessment: Results of a Pilot Study in Groups of Monolingual and Bilingual First-Graders of the Yamalsky District

For many years scholars have been emphasizing the importance of test adaptation to linguistic and cultural features of each population. There are about 100 indigenous languages in Russia, and, to the best of my knowledge, there are almost no tools for linguistic assessment of the speakers of these languages. The current study will make an attempt to identify the effects of culture and bilingualism in the linguistic assessment of children living in the Yamalo Nenets Autonomous Okrug (YaNAO) and is anticipated to improve the current test developed for child linguistic assessment in order to adapt it to the specific characteristics of the children in the region. For this purpose, the analysis of 10 subtest results was performed using binary logistic regression in R. As it was expected each linguistic competence was associated with particular combinations of factors. The current study is the first step in a project on developing assessment instruments for the indigenous small-numbered peoples of the North, Siberia and the Far East.