The Daily Linguistic Practice Interview: a new instrument to assess language use and experience in minority-language children and their effect on reading skills.

The increasing number of primary students with different degrees of exposure to a family minority language requires a reflection on whether and how specific aspects of their daily language experience influence their learning skills. Indeed, Minority Language Children (MLC) often report difficulties in fluent and accurate reading that must be better investigated to exclude neurodevelopmental conditions such as dyslexia.To this aim, we developed a new instrument, the Daily Linguistic Practice Interview (in Italian, the "Prassi Linguistiche Quotidiane" – PLQ Interview). It allows to collect information about the linguistic practice and use in the family (Scale A) and extra-family context (Scale B) and about the child’s linguistic preferences and habits (Scale C). The Interview further provides analogic quantitative measures of minority language active speaking with mother, father, and passive listening, in the form of clocks to paint.The relationship between all these linguistic aspects and reading skills was investigated on 79 MLC aged 8 to 11 y.o. through a correlational approach and several regression models. Our results show that family and extra-family language use influence accurate lexical recognition. At the same time, a “mother effect” broadly affects reading skills in the majority language. In line with these findings, promoting balanced bilingualism in school is relevant for supporting learning skills. Moreover, according to our data, a more careful evaluation of learning disorders should be done on MLC with ad hoc standardized tests and by also considering family language exposure.