Using Achievement Tests to Measure Language Assimilation and Language Bias among Immigrant Children

Richard Akresh () and Ilana Redstone Akresh ()
Additional contact information
Ilana Redstone Akresh: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

No 3532, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Abstract: We use Woodcock Johnson III child assessment data in the New Immigrant Survey to examine language assimilation and test score bias among children of Hispanic immigrants. Our identification strategy exploits the test language randomization (Spanish or English) to quantitatively measure the degree and speed of language assimilation, in addition to the potential costs associated with taking a test in one’s non-dominant language. We find that U.S. born children of Hispanic immigrants are not bilingual as predicted by most language assimilation models but rather are English dominant. English language assimilation occurs at a rapid pace for foreign born children as well; children who arrive in the U.S. at an early age or who have spent more than four years in the U.S. do not benefit from taking the tests in Spanish. Results are robust to a fixed effects specification that controls for household level characteristics constant across siblings.

Keywords: immigration; language assimilation; New Immigrant Survey; Woodcock Johnson achievement tests (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 I20 J18 O15 F22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-mig
Date: 2008-06
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://ftp.iza.org/dp3532.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp3532

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Address: IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Mark Fallak ().