Elternfragebogen zu den Deutschkenntnissen mehrsprachger Kinder

This article presents DaZ-E (Deutsch als Zweitsprache - Elternfragebogen/German as a second language - parent questionnaire), a newly developed questionnaire, available in ten languages, for surveying the German language skills of multilingual pre-kindergarten children. The questionnaire was completed by a linguistically and ethnically heterogeneous sample of 1479 families, each with a three-year-old child (M = 40 months, SD = 4 months), and validated using a sample of 416 children. The concurrent and prognostic validity and the estimates of reliability are found to be very good. The validity for multilingual families is not impaired by the parents' low levels of proficiency in German or of educational attainment. Multi-group comparisons make it possible to show that the ten different language versions are measurement-invariant and that their total scores can be compared. This provides non-German-speaking parents with an instrument allowing a valid and time-efficient assessment of the second-language knowledge of pre-kindergarten children.