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132 chapter 3: literacy-related activities in the home
What Languages Are Spoken at Home?
Although speaking more than one language has advantages, PIRLS 2001
has shown that countries with large proportions of students from homes
where the language of the test is not often spoken had lower average reading
achievement at the fourth grade than those who spoke it more often. For
PIRLS 2006, Exhibit 3.11 presents students’ reports of how frequently they
speak the language of the PIRLS test at home, together with average student
reading achievement. To complement the students’ reports, the exhibit also
presents the percentage of students whose parents reported that the language
of the test is the language they speak most often at home.
About two thirds of the students (66%), on average internationally,
reported always speaking the language of the test at home, but there were
significant percentages that reported sometimes (29% on average) or never
(5% on average) speaking it. Only about half the students in Iran, Israel,
and Morocco reported always speaking the language of the PIRLS test at
home, and even lower percentages in Indonesia (38%), Chinese Taipei (36%),
Kuwait (26%), Singapore (21%), and Luxembourg (3%).
According to parents’ reports, in almost all countries, a large majority of
students (87%), on average, were from homes where at least one parent spoke
the language of the PIRLS test at home most of the time. Notable exceptions
were Luxembourg, where almost all parents spoke Luxembourgish most of
the time, and Kuwait, where the Kuwaiti dialect, a variant of the classical
Arabic taught in school, is widely spoken at home.
Although in many countries there was a positive relationship between
frequency of students speaking the language of the PIRLS test at home and
performance on the PIRLS reading test, the relationship was by no means
universal, and in about one third of the countries, average achievement
among students reporting sometimes speaking the language of the PIRLS test
at home was greater than for those reporting always speaking the language.
In all countries the students who reported never speaking the language of
the PIRLS test at home had lower average reading achievement than those
speaking it more frequently.