Are children with developmental or learning disorders more at risk in immersion education?
(2024) 2024 Annual meeting of the Belgian Association for Psychological Sciences (BAPS) — Location: Brussels (30.May.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 children. Hence, the question whether this bilingual education method is also profitable for children with developmental disorders, remains largely unanswered. We conducted 2 studies in French-speaking Belgium investigating whether children with dyslexia (study 1) and children 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 with diagnosed dyslexia and 112 matched controls were identified within a larger sample of participants. We compared immersed and non-immersed children with or without dyslexia, in terms of linguistic abilities and acquired academic content. In study 2, we recruited more than 50 5th and 6th-grade children with various attentional profiles, including AD(H)D. We assessed their attentional and executive control abilities in addition to their linguistic skills. 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 children with dyslexia or AD(H)D, respectively.
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Parmentier, C., & Szmalec, A. (2024, May 30). Are children with developmental or learning disorders more at risk in immersion education? 2024 Annual meeting of the Belgian Association for Psychological Sciences (BAPS), Brussels. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/277782