Are pupils with developmental or learning disorders more at risk in immersion education?
(2025) 15th International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB) — Location: San Sebastián, Spain (9.June.2025)
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- Abstract
- Although immersion education has gained 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 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 immersion education or whether their reading or attention problems puts them more at risk. In study 1, 28 5th and 11th-grade pupils with diagnosed dyslexia and 112 matched controls were identified within a sample of over 800 participants. A first analysis 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) and acquired academic content. In study 2, we recruited over 70 5th and 6th-grade children with varied attentional profiles, including children with diagnosed AD(H)D; half the sample was in an immersion program. We assessed their attentional and executive control abilities in addition to their foreign-language proficiency. Overall, our findings suggest there is no measurable disadvantage for pupils readingly or attentionally challenged pupils 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 issues 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 immersion education accessibility for atypically developing children.
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Parmentier, C., & Szmalec, A. (2025, June). Are pupils with developmental or learning disorders more at risk in immersion education? 15th International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB), San Sebastián, Spain. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/277784