ACSES
Exploring the Wonders of Bilingualism
OFFICIAL SITE OF THE ASSESSMENT OF CODE-SWITCHING EXPERIENCE SURVEY
OVERVIEW
The Assessment of Code-Switching Experience Survey (ACSES) provides a rapid, reliable, and valid measure of a bilingual's code switching experience. It is currently in an Excel format that can either be emailed to participants prior to their arrival in lab or administered in the lab. It takes about 5-10 minutes to complete and automatically provides scores regarding frequency of code switching, code switching for linguistic need, expressive code switching, early life code switching, and daily use of both languages. Each of these factors is scored on a Likert scale from 1-7 (see specifics below) and can be used as a regression factor or categorically.
INSTRUCTIONS
Here are the instructions that can be emailed to participants:
"For each question in the survey, place a "1" only in the light pink outlined box that corresponds to your answer. For instance, for question #1, if your first language is Spanish, place a "1" in the light pink box to the right of "Spanish" and leave the other pink boxes for that question blank. Some boxes are light purple - these require fill in the blank answers (like a word or number). Some questions have multiple questions each written on a separate row. Please be sure to answer each of these multiple questions."
SCORING
To score the survey, make sure that each pink row has a "1" in just one cell per row and that question #15 has a number (e.g., "2", not "two"). After that, it will be automatically scored, and scores are reported in cells AQ47 through AU48. CS is the code switching score on a scale of 1-7 where 1 indicates never code switching and 7 indicates always switching. Answers in Part 2 contribute to the CS score. Part 2 can be administered alone if you wish to save time and are not interested in the other measures.
Other aspects of language switching that can be measured with the survey are motivation for switching, whether one switched early in life, and daily use of both languages. "Strong" and "weak" are scores from 1-7 which reflect the degree to which each individual switches due to poor lexical access or control (weak) or more voluntary reasons (strong). "Early" measures to what degree one switched early in life, 1 being never and 7 being always. "Daily Use" corresponds to the daily use of both languages where 1 means an individual is not likely to use both languages daily and 7 reflects use of both languages daily.
ACSES has been translated into Catalan, Spanish from Spain and Spanish from Puerto Rico by Damaris Mayans.
The Spanish from Spain version contains minor changes from the Spanish from Puerto Rico version, specifically educational terms that differ in both varieties. The one in Catalan is Standard Catalan and was translated by Damaris Mayans with the help of Francisco Morales, who is a native speaker from the standard variety spoken in Catalonia.
KEY PUBLICATIONS
References and Links