The role of demographic, linguistic and social-psychological factors in explaining plurilingual self-assessment of immigrant youth

The current study investigates the predictive relationships among demographic (arrival age, gender, SES), linguistic (exposure, home languages), and social-psychological (attitude, motivation, parental aspirations) factors and immigrant students' plurilingual self-assessment (SA). The sample includes 160 French-speaking immigrant youth drawn from 6 Israeli schools. Drawing on holistic views of multilingualism, the study utilises a unique plurilingual 'can-do' instrument for examining students' SA in three languages: (1) French, the heritage language (2) Hebrew, the school language and (3) English taught as a foreign language. Questionnaires were administered to collect information about the factors under investigation. Hierarchical regression analyses reveal a differential pattern of prediction of SA in French, Hebrew and English respectively involving analogous background variables, notably current language use, and those playing a language-specific role, e.g. integrative orientation to learn French and Hebrew. Moreover, SA in Hebrew and English were found to be significantly related, implying that SA of additional languages is interdependent. The results highlight the role of the sociolinguistic context and the specificity of each language as a source of variation in multilingual learning among immigrant students besides individual characteristics. The results imply that immigrants' perceived plurilingual repertoire along with context-specific variables must be taken into account in their instruction and assessment.