Bilinguisme et SCOLARITé: Une Enquête Socio-Linguistique sur les Enfants Espagnols Des Écoles Primaires Liégeoises

[Bilingualism and Education: A Sociolinguistic Study on the Spanish Children Attending Primary Schools in the Liege Area]

This sociolinguistic investigation concerns Spanish immigrant children (born in Belgium), who were attending the first or the sixth-grade level in several schools within the Liege area. In the first part of the study an attempt was made to distinguish what in their linguistic performance is due either to their bilingual status or to their belonging to an underprivileged social class The linguistic performance of the Spanish children was compared to that of Belgian children from the same social class and to that of other Belgian children with a more privileged social background. In the second part a comparison was made between the linguistic knowledge of the Spanish children in the French and the Spanish language respectively. Such comparison allowed to estimate also the amount of interference between the two languages.