Language proficiency and study achievement of dyslexic children enrolled in immersion education

Background Over the last decades, immersion education has become a popular and widespread phenomenon to promote foreign language proficiency. One timely and important question that has hardly been investigated is the extent to which immersion education might be an inclusive environment especially towards children with learning disabilities. This study aimed at investigating whether dyslexia can be considered as a risk factor for children and adolescents attending immersion education. Methods French-speaking pupils with diagnosed dyslexia and matched controls (on school level, instruction method followed, socio-economic status and non-verbal intelligence, among others) were identified within a sample of over 800 participants involved in a large-scale study about immersion education in Belgium. The final sample of the current study amounted to 60 participants with or without dyslexia enrolled in immersion or in traditional education (4 groups). It consisted of both 5th grade children and 11th grade adolescents. We assessed French literacy and foreign language (Dutch or English) proficiency, as well as school achievement (using official end-of-curriculum evaluations results provided by the schools). Results A first analysis performed on the over-800-participants initial sample showed that the proportion of pupils with dyslexia enrolled in immersion does not differ from the proportion of pupils with dyslexia schooled in traditional education. Concerning the French literacy abilities in our (sub)sample, our analyses indicated no greater impact of dyslexia for immersed pupils as regard to reading speed and spelling errors. Pupils with dyslexia are negatively affected by immersion education only for reading accuracy. Similar analyses were conducted on foreign language proficiency measures, showing a stronger benefit of immersion for the control compared to the dyslexic group. In a general way however, immersed pupils (with or without dyslexia) performed better on foreign-language comprehension than pupils enrolled in mainstream education. Finally, regarding school achievement, the results showed that immersed pupils with dyslexia significatively outperformed their peers with dyslexia enrolled in traditional education. Conclusion Overall, our results do not reveal any major disadvantage for children and adolescents diagnosed with dyslexia to enter immersion education, neither in terms of language or of content acquisition. These results are not only useful for theorizing about the interactions between bilingualism and (language) learning disabilities, they will also help to guide parents, educators and speech therapists who are confronted with questions about the accessibility of immersion education for atypically developing children.

Affiliations

UCLouvainSSH/IPSY - Psychological Sciences Research Institute

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Parmentier, C., Simonis, M., Van Mensel, L., Hiligsmann, P., Galand, B., Ordonez Magro, L., & Szmalec, A. (2023). Language proficiency and study achievement of dyslexic children enrolled in immersion education. The seventh learning and plasticity meeting (LaP meeting), Äkäslompolo, Finland. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/260629