Sociality and culture explaining academic and cognitive differences of immigrants: the Chinese emigrant students.

Abstract

Sociality remains as an underestimated concept to explain the behavior of young immigrant students mainly considering life critical periods for the cultural and social development. Sociality and Culture, on the other hand, are intrinsically related to understand the cognitive mapping and the academic achievement of immigrant students. In Portugal schools are responding with different approaches to the inclusion of immigrants and of refugees’ which became a concern for students, teachers and for communities. In this cross-sectional study we examined the vocabulary proficiency and the writing accuracy of 102 emigrated students but considering the nationality of their families as main variable. Children and families were selected both as Portuguese second language learners. The results demonstrated that the individuals differ in a significant manner in the tasks’ performance. The data concerning the Chinese emigrants’ group were focused in order to understand how they differ from the other immigrants’ group (determined by parents’ nationality), at the same schools, in different language and cognitive tasks. Children whose parents are Chinese revealed to have similar aptitude as the European peers have for vocabulary decoding; on the contrary, the first group of children presented high level of difficulty to perform writing narrative in Portuguese. Sociolinguistic characteristics involved in language and the academic pressures as related to the parents’ culture are addressed.