Are pupils with developmental or learning disorders more at risk in immersion education?
(2024) Conference on Multilingualism — Location: Aix-en-Provence (10.June.2024)
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- Abstract
- Although immersion education has gained much popularity worldwide, it is often regarded as an elitist approach focused on the cognitively most gifted pupils. Hence, the question whether this bilingual education method is also profitable for pupils with developmental disorders, remains largely unanswered. We conducted 2 studies in French-speaking Belgium, within schools providing the European type of immersion education, also known as Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). We investigated whether pupils with dyslexia (study 1) and pupils with AD(H)D (study 2) can also benefit from an immersion education experience or whether their reading or attention problems puts them more at risk. In study 1, 28 5th and 11th-grade children and adolescents with diagnosed dyslexia and 112 matched controls were identified within a sample of over 800 participants. A first analysis performed on this large initial sample showed that the prevalence of dyslexia in our immersed sample was comparable to the prevalence amongst the pupils in traditional education. Then, we compared immersed and non-immersed pupils with or without dyslexia (4 groups), in terms of linguistic abilities (in both French and the target foreign language: Dutch or English) and acquired academic content. In study 2, we recruited more than 50 5th and 6th-grade children with various attentional profiles, including children with diagnosed AD(H)D. Half the sample was enrolled in an immersion program. We assessed their attentional and executive control abilities in addition to their foreign-language proficiency. Overall, our findings suggest that there is no measurable disadvantage for pupils with dyslexia or with attentional difficulties to attend immersion education, neither for foreign-language learning, nor for acquiring academic content. Also, we observed that immersion education did not exacerbate the reading or attentional problems of pupils with dyslexia or AD(H)D, respectively. These results are not only useful for theorizing about the interactions between bilingualism and 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.
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Parmentier, C., & Szmalec, A. (2024, June 12). Are pupils with developmental or learning disorders more at risk in immersion education? Conference on Multilingualism, Aix-en-Provence. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/277783