Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment French Immersion and Weschler reading scores low?

Hi everyone,
My son is finally having his testing done by the school psychologist and today they did most (or all possibly) of the Weschler. He meets with her for about another hour tomorrow (today was 2.5 hours) and he will be done. My question is in regards to reading scores and french immersion students. Obviously the test is in english, but he has been in French since Kindie, so they expect his english reading to be behind a bit because they haven't officially been taught much in the way of english pronunciations etc (he reads at a very advanced level in french-grades ahead of his peers even though we are not french speaking and always reads books that are advanced for his age in english too). Anyways he was upset when he came home today because although he went quite far on many sections of the test, he said he "only" went to grade 7 in reading and was very upset (obviously this is still advanced because he just started grade 5). I will know more when i have the results but was just curious if anyone had encountered this before and how the psychologist qualified it in their reports?

I don't have a lot to offer in terms of your question, but it did bring to mind two thoughts:

1) Is he taking the WIAT (Weschler Individual Achievement Test) or the WISC (Weschler Intelligence Scale for Children)? The former is an achievement test and the later an IQ or intelligence test. The WIAT would have grade equivalencies, but the WISC would not.

2) I've never heard of a tester telling the kid who is testing how well he did in terms of 'you made it to 7th grade level,' etc. during the test. I'd, honestly, be a little bothered by this as it might diminish performance in a child who is perfectionistic.

I can certainly see as how achievement level on English reading/writing tests might be lowered in a child who has been in a second language immersion school, FWIW. In terms of ability/IQ scores, I don't expect that immersion in a second language would lower scores on most portions of the verbal comprehension index of the WISC except maybe vocabulary. It may be a plus or a hindrance on that piece.

Thanks Cricket. He is definitely taking the WISC as she specifically stated it was an IQ test unlike the woodcock-johnson he has taken before which is an achievement test i guess.
As far as telling him, he's a big busybody after being tested so many times (the school has been a bit ridiculous as i mentioned in a different post), so he admitted he asked her how far he got (i know he mentioned on spelling there was a max of 60 questions and he went right to the end, but i'm not sure if the Weschler is similar to other tests he has taken where they go all the way to the end only if they keep getting them right? Or if everyone answers all the questions

My son is in French Immersion and was assessed by a private psychologist, and it was mentioned briefly in the report intro. I don't think any of the scores were scaled or adjusted in any way.

It was the least of my worries, actually... My son's assessment was kind of a write off anyway. He was seven and his behavior really interfered with the results. The doc said she could get only :45 (per each two hour session) of compliance out of him due to attention/hyperactivity problems. She actually wrote in the report that it was not reflective of his true cognitive profile and that we should test him again in two years.

Anyway, I know that doesn't exactly answer your question... but I'd still take your son's results with a grain of salt.

My kids aren't in a language immersion program but we have had a number of friends who are and we attended intros to our local immersion programs when our children were entering kindergarten in hopes they might lottery in... so fwiw (which is probably not much lol!) what I've always been told is that the immersion student's English (reading/writing) achievement lags a bit behind non-immersion kids for the first few years of elementary, but generally catches up by 3rd - 4th grade. I'm sure the school psychologist is most likely familiar with testing children who are in the immersion program, so if she doesn't address it in her report you can always ask her about it.

I'm also guessing that if he really was given a grade equivalency # and if he was taking a true "spelling" test is that he was given the WIAT achievement battery in addition to the WISC. The WISC really doesn't take 2.5 hours (at least not in our experience), and I've also never seen a grade equivalent from an IQ test, they come with achievement tests. Like Cricket mentioned - it's really highly unusual for a psych to tell a child exactly what their score is or how they performed relative to other students on this type of testing - the info is usually given to the parent, and if a student asks they would be told something like "you did very well".

Best wishes,

polarbear

Yes, immersion can have an effect on some IQ test scores.

How do I know? We speak French at home, but DS8 was in an English only daycare/preschool from 3mo. onward and at 5 was on his way to being receptive only in French. So we enrolled him in a Spanish immersion program for K.

After two summers in France which convinced him he could actually speak French at home and one year of K mostly in Spanish he had a full evaluation at school, which includes a WISC in English. He had an 8 on the vocabulary subtest. Fast forward 5 months, with 2 months of English phonics and daily English reading at home. He was re-tested on the DAS and got the equivalen of a 14 scaled score on word definitions (which is I think equivalent to the WISC vocabulary subtest). 5 months of cramming and we jumped from the 25th to the 90th percentile.

So yeah, there can be an impact, and I'd take results with a grain of salt. Although my son tests so weirdly that... Maybe he is an example of one (weird fact: he was close to the age cut-off so was administered parts of both the preschool and the elementary age batteries of the DAS, and ended up with a score at the 58th percentile for preschool vocabulary and at the 90th percentile for elementary vocabulary).

All three of my kids were/are in French immersion from Pre-K to mid-elementary (eldest through 4th grade, middle through 2nd, youngest just started 3rd). I don't think that it hurt their English skills. Of course, from what your son reported, he is still well above grade level, just perhaps not quite as much as you expected. As others have noted, this is just one test - another test a few months from now might look quite different.

I don't recall all of the test scores for my older ones, but in 3rd grade, my eldest took both the Terra Nova and the standardized test that kids in France take. She did well on both, and scored in the 98th percentile on the Terra Nova reading portion, 97th percentile overall. On the French test, she didn't do quite as well, but her scores were around 90th percentile. She is now a senior in HS, with high scores in the SAT Critical Reading and ACT Reading. My youngest doesn't have any standardized test results yet, and the middle one had a Lexile range from junior in college to graduate level (take that with a grain of salt) on testing last year in 8th grade.

Don't worry about it - he is fine.

If exposure to French during the school day boosts French language skills, shouldn't lack of exposure to English during the day hurt English language skills (which are vastly more important in the U.S.)? The NYT article quoted below suggests it does. It also seems odd to teach a subject such as American history in French.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/19/nyregion/19bilingual.html
Looking for Baby Sitters: Foreign Language a Must
By JENNY ANDERSON
New York Times
August 18, 2010

...

In recent years, a number of neuroscientists and psychologists have tried to untangle the impact of bilingualism on brain development. “It doesn’t make kids smarter,” said Ellen Bialystok, a professor of psychology at York University in Toronto and the author of “Bilingualism in Development: Language, Literacy and Cognition.”

“There are documented cognitive developments,” she said, “but whatever smarter means, it isn’t true.”

Ms. Bialystok’s research shows that bilingual children tend to have smaller vocabularies in English than their monolingual counterparts, and that the limited vocabulary tends to be words used at home (spatula and squash) rather than words used at school (astronaut, rectangle). The measurement of vocabulary is always in one language: a bilingual child’s collective vocabulary from both languages will probably be larger.

“Bilingualism carries a cost, and the cost is rapid access to words,” Ms. Bialystok said. In other words, children have to work harder to access the right word in the right language, which can slow them down — by milliseconds, but slower nonetheless.

At the same time, bilingual children do better at complex tasks like isolating information presented in confusing ways. In one test researchers frequently use, words like “red” and “green” flash across a screen, but the words actually appear in purple and yellow. Bilingual children are faster at identifying what color the word is written in, a fact researchers attribute to a more developed prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for executive decision-making, like which language to use with certain people).

Ms. D’Souza said that both of her sons lagged their peers by almost a year in verbal development. Her pediatrician recommended speech therapy, and one son’s preschool teacher expressed concern that he did not know the alphabet. But when both started speaking, at around 3 years old, they were able to move fluidly among three languages. She said that her older son tested in the 99th percentile for the city’s gifted and talented program.

“The flexibility of their thinking helps them in nonlinguistic abilities like science and math,” she said, speaking of her children. “But at the same time the normal things — the alphabet — they have trouble with that.”

One arena in which being bilingual does not seem to help is the highly competitive kindergarten admission process.

“It doesn’t give you a leg up on the admissions process,” said Victoria Goldman, author of the sixth edition of “The Manhattan Family Guide to Private Schools.” It is one piece of the bigger puzzle, which includes tests scores, interviews and the ability of a child to follow directions. “Speaking another language is indicative that you are verbal, but you have to be behaved.”

George P. Davison, head of school at Grace Church School, a competitive downtown school, said that bilingualism tended to suppress verbal and reading comprehension test scores by 20 to 30 percent for children younger than 12. “If anything, it can have a negative effect on admissions,” he said.

Ms. Bialystok said that for a child to retain a language, a nanny probably would not do the trick. “It’s an interesting solution; it gives young children a consistent exposure,” she said. “But how long will the nanny be around, and who else will the child use that language with?”

We haven't chosen to teach any foreign languages to our children. Our older son dabbled in Spanish for a while but his interest fell off, and we didn't insist that he continue.

If a very young child of mine has a finite capacity for learning new vocabulary, as well as limited time resources spent on that, I'd actually prefer that this learning be in the primary language, since one would naturally tend to learn the basic words of everyday life before more advanced terms. This hopefully leads to the ability to discuss more complex and abstract topics early on, instead of simply learning duplicate words for the same thing but in different languages. Instead of hoping for a generalized cognitive benefit from learning extra languages early, I'd rather my children learn one language deeply to directly enable higher-level learning, discussion and thought.

I suspect that the D'Souza woman from the article is deluding herself when she attributes enhanced math and science ability to her choice of extra foreign languages for her children. It might be true, but there's no way she could know it to be so, and I'm skeptical until I see some actual evidence.

I'm also guessing that many gifted people, at least the verbally gifted, would pick up languages much more easily than the general populace, at any age. That's true in my case, and I didn't learn my first foreign language at a young age.

Interesting article.



I haven't seen this with FI DD9, although it's impossible to measure, really... how do we know what her English vocab would have been if she'd been in an English program? Her English vocab has never been tested against her English-stream age peers. She'll ask her brother sometimes "do you even know what that means?" and when she explains it to him, 9 times out of 10 she's right.

FI (and language disorder) DS8 interestingly seems somewhat ok as well, although it's safe to assume there's a deficit. He has other language deficits involving pronunciation and sequencing, but strangely his grammar seems ok, and he uses a reasonable variety of English words.

On a related note, though... I remember I was at the school one day and overheard a grade 4 boy in the FI program who needed help to spell "school." I was stunned. FI DD was 6 and in grade 2 at the time and could have spelled it for him.


This is a benefit also mentioned by our psychologist.

I think, as far as vocab is concerned, what and how much a child reads outside of school, as well as the way language is used by their parents, is going to have an impact regardless of which program they're in.

Re: home time Vs. school: My husband has very poor grammar. He says things like "you don't want nothing?" I make a point of taking this literally and pointing it out to my kids. "I don't want no broccoli" ...results in broccoli being served. Both kids think it's funny, and even my language disorder son has better grammar than is dad.

Originally Posted by Bostonian

“The flexibility of their thinking helps them in nonlinguistic abilities like science and math,”

Three of the four kids in DD's gifted math program are from the French side of the school, and DS8's best marks were in math and science

On a related note, DH was English-only at school and he has the worst vocabulary I've ever encountered. It's shockingly bad (for example, he'd never heard of the word "introvert" and thought I'd made it up). He's very mechanical and is clever with formulas and math - in fact he scored higher than one of the company engineers on a recent test at work, but his language skills are in the toilet.

I think that acquiring multiple languages definitely shapes cognitive development, but the aptitudes the child was born with have a big influence on the outcome.