Abstract
[Bilingualism and School Success in Children from Spanish Immigrants in the Liége Area]
Three groups of children from Spanish immigrants in the Liege area were compared on a series of intelligence and linguistic tests for written and spoken French and Spanish languages. An interview and a questionnaire of their teachers and parents provided information about school success and educational style. The first group (N = 23) attended the sixth-grade, advancing normally. The second group (N = 24) attended the Mine level, but had suffered already one or two school failures. The third group consisted of 19 twelve-years old children actually attending the fifth or the fourth level, after one or two failures. Only a few significant differences were found between the groups. They all relate to the morpho-syntactic aspects of written French and to the educational style of the parents, as place where the child does his home-work, the parents’ attention to school work, etc. Little or no differences were found between the groups especially between the two groups attending the sixth grade for the measures concerning spoken French, spoken and written Spanish, general intellectual functioning, perceptual and spatial structuration and other familial and socio-cultural variables Suggestion is made that written language is a most important factor in the teacher’s decision regarding success or failure in the schoolchildren from Spanish immigrants.