Academic achievement in a language revitalisation context: a study on the influence of language and socioeconomic factors

ABSTRACT

We examined the influence of language and socioeconomic factors on academic achievement in the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC): a multilingual society with a recent history of language revitalisation. We analysed scores obtained by Grade 4 and Grade 10 students on a diagnostic mathematics test administered in either Basque or Spanish in the BAC. We found that L1 Basque users who were of high socioeconomic status (SES) were the top performers across language groups. A larger percentage of high-SES L1 Spanish users earned top scores when tested in their home language than when tested in Basque. In contrast, low-SES L1 users of Spanish performed better when tested in Basque. These findings corroborate and expand upon findings from previous research conducted in the BAC, which shows that SES and language shape academic achievement in contexts of successful language revitalisation efforts.

KEYWORDS:

• Basque
• language revitalisation
• language variation
• socioeconomic status

Acknowledgements

This research was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, under grant N. PID2019-103859RB-I00.

The authors wish to thank our anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

The opinions expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect the opinions of our colleagues or those of the funding agency. We have no potentially relevant interests to declare.

Notes

1 We also opted to exclude immigrant students because they comprised a relatively small proportion of our sample. Immigrant students represented 7 percent (n = 1,131) of students in Grade 4, and 9 percent (n = 1,369) of students in Grade 10.

2 SES was measured using the Index of Socioeconomic and Cultural Status (ISEC.) Each student was assigned a socioeconomic rank, ranging from 1 (the lowest level) to 5 (the highest level.) Those rankings were calculated by averaging the values associated with factors such as household income, parental occupation, level of parental education, number of books in the house, and access to the Internet (Flores 2019). That average was converted into a descriptor of overall SES: Lower class, lower-middle class, middle class, upper-middle class, and upper class.

3 Students were grouped according to the linguistic model of their school. If test center administrators opted to test students in the language of instruction, all students took the mathematics test in the same language, which corresponded to linguistic model. If administrators elected to test students in their home language, students within the same test group could take the test in different languages. In those instances, the language of assessment was based on self-reported information about home language use. For example, within a single testing group from a Basque-medium school, L1 Spanish students could take the mathematics test in Spanish and L1Basque users could take it in Basque.

In Grade 10, nearly 99% of students in Basque-medium schools took the test in Basque, 90.83% of students in Spanish-medium schools took it in Spanish, and 88.78% of students in bilingual schools took it in the whatever language they received mathematics instruction (Instituto Vasco de Evaluación e Investigación Educativa 2012b). Percentages for students tested in the language of instruction were similar for Grade 4 students: 97.01% for Basque-medium, 93.15% for Spanish-medium and 85.24% for bilingual schools (Instituto Vasco de Evaluación e Investigación Educativa 2012a).

4 Information available to the researchers did not include the process of development and translation of the test, or whether Basque or Spanish was the language in which the test was originally developed. Also, the data available did not contain information on the center where each student took the assessment or information about students’ performance on the Basque, Spanish, and English components of the assessment. Hence, we could not identify the language used to test any individual student, nor could we relate measures of language arts proficiency with the mathematics scores.

5 As shown in Table 2, in Grade 4, 4% of L1 Basque students across the three SES levels (n = 154 students) were tested in Spanish. Similarly, in Grade 10, only 3% of L1 Basque students (n = 99 students) were tested in Spanish. These percentages reflect the fact that most L1Basque attend schools that teach and conduct assessments in Basque, or schools that utilize a bilingual model (Cenoz and Gorter 2019).

6 We based the relative magnitude of the effect size associated with SES on Sirin’s (2005) meta-analysis of the literature about academic achievement and SES. Sirin concluded that, for fixed-effects models with student-level data, the average effect size for SES was .28.

7 There are two types of schools in the BAC: public and semi-public. Public schools are state-funded, while semi-public or ‘concertado' schools are privately-run, but publicly funded (Elosua and Egaña 2017; Lasagabaster 2001). There are public and private varieties of Model A (e.g. Spanish-medium), Model D (e.g. Basque-medium), and Model B (e.g. bilingual) schools. Students at semi-public schools tend to be of higher-SES backgrounds than students at public schools, across linguistic models (Flores 2019; Gortazar, 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation: [Grant N. PID2019-103859RB-I00].