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Reading skills of young immigrants in Canada: the effects of duration of residency, home language exposure and schools - June 2008

2. Literature Review

Though there exists a vast literature on issues of labour market integration of immigrants, there are fewer studies that have examined the outcomes of immigrant children and youth. The literature review focuses on studies with assessed outcome measures over time in order to examine initial performance and the rate of progression among immigrant children and youth in Canada, which are key indicators of integration.

Sweetman (1998) compared the school performance in mathematics and science of immigrant children to native born children using data for Australia, Canada, Great Britain and the United States taken from the Third International Math and Science Survey 1995 (TIMSS). He found that immigrant children's test scores in mathematics and science were typically lower than those of native-born children in Canada and the United States but were higher than those of the native-born children in Australia. He also found evidence of a convergence towards the native-born mean performance with more years in the school system in the cases of Canada and the United States.

Worswick (2001) compared the school performance of the children of immigrant parents to that of the children of Canadian-born parents based on the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY). The study employed test scores in reading and mathematics for children in grade 2 and higher as well as the Peabody Picture and Vocabulary Test (PPVT) test scores for vocabulary of children in kindergarten and grade one. The analysis also employed the qualitative measures of school performance provided by the Person-Most-Knowledgeable (PMK) about the child (the child's mother in roughly 90% of the cases) as well as the qualitative measures of school performance provided by the child's teacher. The children of immigrant parents whose first language was neither English nor French were found to be at a disadvantage in the early years at school in vocabulary and to a lesser extent reading in the grade 2 through grade 5 range. However, by age 14 these children's average performance was equal to or better than that of the children of Canadian-born parents and the children of immigrant parents whose first language is neither English nor French.

In a second paper, Worswick (2004) analyzed the entire test score distribution of the children of immigrants using the NLSCY. The goal of the study was to see whether the average performances found in Worswick (2001) hid important differences in the distribution of test score performance. Because the average test score of a particular demographic group of children may be close to an acceptable level while a significant percentage of the children may have very low test scores. Worswick (2004) found that the 10th percentile of the vocabulary (PPVT) distribution was lower for children of immigrant parents whose mother tongue was neither English nor French than for children of Canadian-born parents. However, this difference was present primarily in the kindergarten years and was not present at higher grades in terms of reading and mathematics test scores.

Ma (2003), analysed the reading, mathematics and science outcomes of immigrant youth in Canada using data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The research found that there were no differences between immigrant and non-immigrant students in mathematics, but there were performance differences in favour of non-immigrant students in reading and science. This study analyzed only one type of immigrants — those born outside of Canada — and did not analyze the performance of first generation students (born in Canada to parents who were born outside of the country).

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Date Modified:
2008-06-11