What’s on: Cultural diversity and new educational approaches for specific school populations

Abstract

Education policy regarding the immigrant school population is of upmost importance for current scientific research in social sciences. Digital resources and assessment instruments are challenges in education and psychology research, demanding knowledge from school community to address specific traits of learning and academic achievement. The education of future generation should be conceived based on multicultural idea of existing different cognitive profiles that have different selfregulations in learning environments as language acquisition development process. Immigrant school population is frequently neglected by school management and become emergent the development of open educational resources, validated tools and digital materials. Method: This post-doctoral research is focused in the development of open repository of paper and digital resources for school education, particularly addressing educational approaches for Portuguese second language learners. In current empirical study we are assessing a large sample of immigrant students from public schools, aged between 8 and 17 years old, learning Portuguese as second language, with heterogeneous profiles, in Lisbon district, from several levels of education. The main goal is to determine learner’s cognitive profiles in second language setting, and which common performances we can find between different home language speakers answering to 15 tests in the same circumstances. We believe that accurate evaluation tests can produce new changes in learning environments of linguistic minorities. Preliminary results will be discussed regarding three hypotheses about verbal behaviors in cognates, idiomatic utterances and verbal analogy tasks according to three variables: age, home language and exposure to second language. The variation of these predictors might have influence in cognitive and linguistic profiles. Additionally will be evaluated the reliability and difficulty of each task to provide a more psychometric sound measure than traditional other tools of assessment in national second language area. Findings will demonstrate new understanding about different speaking proficiency levels, rationales about predictive factors, and cutoffs to be considered as standards that will be adopted for the specific portuguese diagnostic test that is in validation process. Some of these new insights could be extended to the general investigation of proficiency and cognitive decoding skills in second language research, mainly for European languages context.