Language Minority Students’ Status: One Large Scale Exam and Two Countries

Year 2019, Volume: 8 Issue: 3, 170 - 189, 30.09.2019

Tuba Özturan , Gülşah Uyar Aycan Demir Ayaz

Abstract

Educational policies are
dynamic and can be revised when needed. In order to analyze how successful a
country is, what their rank is among others and what a country needs to
improve, international exams, like PISA, are conducted by authorities. Also,
there are many countries with a large immigrant population. In this regard, the
educational policies should include some regulations for immigrant students’
education. Canada and Belgium have been chosen as participant countries of this
study since they are bi/multilingual countries. Even though they are similar to
each other with their immigrant population, the education policies in these
countries differ. This study aims to compare the success of the immigrant
students in reading skills in both countries as well as their sense of
belonging and their parents’ education by utilizing PISA-2015 data. The results
display that the immigrant students in Canada have outperformed their peers in
Belgium. Furthermore, the immigrant parents in Canada are more educated than
those in Belgium, and Canadian immigrant students show lower sense of belonging
to school when compared to the peers in Belgium. Although these factors are
controlled, the Canadian immigrant students outperform; therefore, some remarks
for education policies in bi/multilingual countries can be made.        

Keywords

PISA, language minority students, Canada, Belgium

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