The effects of Spanish home language use on the scholastic performance of Hispanic pupils

Abstract

This study looked at the home language use patterns of Hispanic families in an urban setting to determine the differences between academic achievement, language development, and psychosocial adjustment of children whose families have maintained Spanish as the main home language (additive bilingual home environment) and children who come from homes where a switch to English has occurred (subtractive bilingual home environment. For this study, 108 subjects were selected based on their ability to meet criteria established to control for (a) initial home language, (b) length of enrolment in school, and (c) socio‐economic status. All the subjects were enrolled in the fifth or sixth grade at a large East Los Angeles elementary school during the 1982–83 year. A series of independent t tests was used to compare the two groups of primary interest on school measures of academic achievement (English reading proficiency, mathematics, Spanish reading vocabulary, and academic grade point average), language development (oral English proficiency and number of school months that individual students were classified as limited in English), and psychosocial adjustment (attendance, disciplinary referrals, effort grade point average, and grade level retention). In this study, students from additive bilingual home contexts significantly (p < 0.05) outperformed students from the subtractive group on five of ten scholastic measures. Regarding the remaining five variables, no statistically significant differences between the two groups were found. For each of these five variables, the group mean for students from Spanish‐speaking homes was higher than the corresponding group mean for students from homes where English had replaced Spanish. Although not statistically significant, the differences on these variables were pronounced and always in the same direction. The overall assumption of many educators that Hispanic students from Spanish language homes do less well in school than Hispanic students from primarily English‐speaking homes is challenged by the results of this study. The direction of the difference in each of ten scholastic variables indicates that students from additive bilingual home situations have conspicuous advantages when compared to counterparts from subtractive bilingual homes.

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