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

7. Conclusion and Implications for Policy

The main purpose of this paper was to examine the skill development of immigrant children (15 year olds) using the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Youth in Transition Survey (YITS) data and to determine its implications for public policy. The research focused on answering the following four of questions:

  • Does the age at which immigrant children arrive in Canada have an impact on their academic integration in schools?
  • Does exposure to different languages at home influence reading skills of immigrants?
  • What are the relative influences of individual, family and school factors on the academic performance of 15 year old immigrants? How do they differ from their Canadian counterparts?
  • Does immigrant reading performance vary between schools?

At age 16, youth in most Canadian provinces can decide to either stay on to graduate with an intention to pursue post-secondary education, graduate and join the labour market, or dropout from formal education. For recent immigrants (1-5 years in Canada) the timing of these decisions is very crucial, as their reading skills might not yet be developed enough to ensure the best possible outcomes of their decisions. This issue is even more pronounced for immigrants whose home language is not English and French. However, most immigrants appeared to have caught up in five years through integration.

In 2000, across all participating countries including Canada, girls outperformed their male peers in reading scores. In Canada the reading gap between boys and girls stood at 32 score points. The analysis of scores of the two immigrant groups revealed similar disadvantages for boys. Immigrant born boys were the most disadvantaged students in terms of reading scores. However, the gender gap was virtually identical for all the immigrant groups and the same as the gender gap for native-born students. This suggests that more intense interventions should be aimed at improving scores of boys in order to reduce the gender reading gap for native, first generation and immigrant born students.

Although not as evident from bivariate analyses, both immigrant and first generations students performed on average at lower levels in reading compared to their native born peers. The reading skill disadvantage was especially significant for immigrant boys, students whose home language was other than the test language and those with Canadian residency of less than 5 years. On the positive note, the length of residency in Canada tended to mitigate these differences indicating rapid integration. On average, five-year duration of Canadian residency was able to reduce the reading skill gap by more than 60%. In addition, those exposed to a home language matching that of the test language experienced no reading skill disadvantages, irrespectively of the length of residency in Canada.

Finally, multilevel analyses were trying to identify the effects of schools on the reading skills of immigrant students. On average, and this being true for all analyzed groups, there was a positive association between the school's average socio-economic status and the school's average performance in reading. The choice of schools across different Canadian regions did not matter for immigrant born students. For first generation students, there was a significant average advantage for schools in the Atlantic region, the Prairies and British Columbia. However, between school differences were found to have caused less variation in scores than did differences within schools. This suggested that for reading skills, the choice of school was not as important as one's individual characteristics.

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Date Modified:
2008-06-11