Exploring perceived multilingual proficiency among immigrant youth with different arrival ages in the destination country

ABSTRACT

This study examines the role of age of arrival (AoA) in immigrant students’ perceived multilingual proficiency. Additionally, the study investigates the demographic, linguistic and social-psychological variables distinguishing young-arriving immigrants from their middle and older-arriving peers. The sample included 274 eleventh grade Russian (L1) speaking immigrants acquiring Hebrew as a second language (L2) and English as a third language (L3), divided into three groups according to arrival ages in Israel: 0–6; 7–9 and 10–12 years. The instruments included a ‘can-do’ questionnaire measuring multilingual self-assessment, (SA) and a background questionnaire. The results indicated a strong relationship between AoA and students’ SA in L2 and L3 extending research, based primarily on language tests, demonstrating that AoA is an important factor explaining multilingual proficiency. Further, the findings revealed that students’ self-assessed listening in L2 and L3 distinguished the young-arriving immigrants from their middle and older-arriving peers. Current use of L3, parental encouragement to study L2 and an inverse integrative orientation to study L3 distinguished the older-arriving group from the other two groups. These results highlight the role of the sociolinguistic context and the specificity of each language as a source of variation in L2 and L3 acquisition besides individual characteristics.

KEYWORDS:

• Age of arrival
• self-assessment
• immigrant students
• multilingualism
• motivation
• exposure

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the two anonymous readers for their invaluable comments!

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Former Soviet Union.

2 Eleven participants did not answer this question.

3 The schools in Israeli educational system are spread across eight main districts divided according to geographical areas, sector and settlement mode (urban, suburban, rural).

4 The other remaining cases (n=23, 1.2%) mentioned Ukrainian and Georgian.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Orly Haim

Orly Haim works as a pedagogical advisor and course instructor at Beit Berl College, Israel. She also teaches in the School of Education at Tel-Aviv University. Her research interests are: bi/trilingualism, language acquisition, multilingual education, language policy and teacher cognition in language teaching.