Abstracts - Earli

The impact of social class, language use and psychological distress on the educationalachievements of minority ethnic adolescents in a deprived area of londonCatherine Rothon, University of London, United KingdomThis study examines the impact of social class, language and psychological distress on theeducational achievement of minority ethnic adolescents in East London. It focuses on achievementat the General Certificate of Secondary Education Examinations (GCSEs), taken at age 16. Thesemark the end of compulsory education in Britain. Preliminary analysis suggests that there aremarked differences in performance by ethnicity before controlling for confounding factors. AsianIndian boys and girls perform particularly well whilst black Caribbean, black African, blackBritish and Pakistani males achieve lower results. In all ethnic groups females outperform males.For many of these poorly performing groups, social class is unable to account for the differencesobserved. Language spoken at home forms a larger part of the explanation for the differentials.The overall score for psychological distress had a greater magnitude and significance for boys.Much of the difference could be explained by the types of distress experienced; girls morecommonly suffered from emotional symptoms, whilst boys were more likely to exhibit conductproblems. When the overall measure was broken down into its constituent parts it was found thatconduct problems had the strongest relationship with achievement; the effect for emotionalsymptoms was non-significant. Psychological distress was particularly important in explaining therelatively low performance of black African boys. This finding highlights a possible explanatorymechanism for observed differences in achievement at GCSE by gender, a phenomenon thatempirical research has often struggled to find an answer for.Preparation for school learning in low-income and minority familiesPaul P.M. Leseman, Utrecht University, NetherlandsAnna F. Scheele, Utrecht University, NetherlandsAziza Y. Mayo, Utrecht University, NetherlandsThe paper reports findings of a longitudinal study into informal preparation for school in lowincomeDutch and Turkish and Moroccan immigrant families in the Netherlands. Although nodifferences in nonverbal cognitive skills (intelligence, working memory) were found betweenDutch and immigrant children at age three, indicating equally distributed learning potential,profound disadvantages for immigrant children appeared on a whole range of language skills inboth first (Turkish, Tarifit-Berber) and second language (Dutch). Moreover, these disadvantagesappeared to be rather stable over time and even to increase. Using structural equation modelling,factors in the home environment, covering broad dimensions of informal language, pre-literacyand pre-math instruction, were found to explain most of the variance in language testscores, inaddition to individual cognitive abilities. The results indicate a situation of subtractivebilingualism in the immigrant families studied here. The paper will try to identify factors that canexplain the situation of subtractive bilingualism, which include mothers’ social isolation, childrearing stress, lack of printed materials in the first language, and use of television and electronicgames.– 390 –