The New Immigrants’ Generation in Portuguese Classes: disproportionate relationships and group-specific issues in academic development.

Abstract

The present study examines nationality group effect on language proficiency considering six groups of Portuguese immigrant students (M=13 years old; SD= 2,7): Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Portuguesespeaking African countries, Latin America, Asia and China. This research aims to verify whether students from different nationalities evidence similar difficulty levels in tests on language skills. Results of MANOVA showed that nationality groups differed in a significant manner, in particular, two groups – South Asia (Meridional) and Latin America. The Asian group evidenced more difficulty in vocabulary and verbal reasoning when compared to other nationality groups. Higher scores were attained by the Latin American group whose language of testing had common features with the home language and therefore showed more overlapping. The influence of the covariable "Languages spoken at home" on the results was also confirmed, which suggests that nationality is a less strong predictor compared to the number of languages spoken at home.