This document summarizes a study that analyzed data on 14,000 Dutch 2nd grade students to examine the relationship between immigrant children's use of their mother tongue and their proficiency in Dutch. The study found that two-thirds of immigrant children speak their mother tongue in at least one context, such as with family. Additionally, the more often immigrant children spoke their mother tongue, the lower their proficiency tended to be in Dutch. The study controlled for factors like mothers' country of birth, education level, and language skills, which all correlated with children's lower scores on standardized Dutch language tests compared to children with Dutch-speaking parents.

1. Journal of Education Research ISSN: 1935-052X
Volume 10, Number 2 © Nova Science Publishers, Inc.
LANGUAGE CHOICE AND LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY
OF IMMIGRANT PARENTS AND CHILDREN
Geert Driessen
Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
ABSTRACT
Immigrant children are exposed to not only language variation in the host country
but also to that of the country their parents left behind. They often lag behind their native-
born peers regarding proficiency in the host country’s language. This article focuses on
language use of immigrant parents and children in the Netherlands. The main question is
how the mother tongue, that is the language their parents speak, influences the child’s
proficiency in Dutch. Analysis of data on 14,000 grade 2 pupils collected in the national
large-scale COOL cohort study present an answer as to how often children speak their
mother tongue, and how this relates to their proficiency in Dutch. The results show that
two thirds of the children speak their mother tongue in one or more of the areas
discerned. Furthermore, there is a tendency that the more often they speak their mother
tongue the lower their proficiency in Dutch is.
INTRODUCTION
When children are born, and even before that moment, the first language they hear is that
of their mother. But gradually the number of languages they are exposed to increases
considerably. Not only within the family, but gradually also in the neighbourhood, in daycare,
the nursery school and primary school; and of course there is the huge increasing influence of
the (social) media. This language variation not only exists between different languages, but
also within a language between different speakers of that language (Van den Branden &
Verhelst, 2011). Therefore it probably is true to say that language always is synonymous with
multilingualism (Sierens & Van Avermaet, 2014). How to deal with this seemingly confusing
variation, especially in school, has been the topic of much controversy for many years now
(Baker, 2001; Cummins, 1979; Söhn, 2004). This is even more the case for immigrant
children, as they often are exposed to not only the language variation of the host country but
also to that of the country their parents left behind. In education, achievement of most
immigrant children lags significantly behind that of native-born children (OECD, 2015;
Stevens & Dworkin, 2014; Strand, 2014). This disadvantage already is clearly visible when

E-mail: g.driessen@its.ru.nl

2. Geert Driessen
98
the children enter primary school, or even before that when they visit preschool institutions
such as daycare centres and playgroups. A major factor is the language spoken at home,
which often is not the one spoken at school (Demie, 2014; Dixon & Wu, 2014; Van Tubergen
& Kalmijn, 2009). For educational policy and practice the key question is how the use of the
children’s mother tongue is related to or affects the children’s proficiency in the host
country’s language. And, following from that: how can the immigrant children’s delays best
be prevented or remediated (Demeuse, Frandji, Greger, & Rochex, 2012; Goodman &
Burton, 2012; OECD, 2015)?
IMMIGRANT CHILDREN IN DUTCH EDUCATION
The focus of the present study is on the Netherlands, a country which hosts almost 17
million inhabitants of whom 22 percent have an immigrant background. The largest groups
are Turkish (2.3%), Moroccan (2.3%), Surinamese (2.1%) and Antillean (0.9%) immigrants
(CBS, 2016). Since the 1960s the Turks and Moroccans have come to the Netherlands as so-
called guest workers to perform low-skilled work in factories; in later years their numbers
have grown as a consequence of processes of family reunification and family formation.
Surinam and the Antillean islands were former Dutch colonies and many of its inhabitants,
who have the Dutch nationality, have immigrated to the Netherlands as of the 1970s. One
characteristic most of these adult immigrants share is their low level of formal schooling.
Another is that they often have no or only a limited command of Dutch, despite the fact that
many of them have been living in the Netherlands for many years and upon arriving in the
Netherlands were obliged to take an integration course including a Dutch language
programme. Earlier large-scale longitudinal studies have shown that, at the very start of their
school careers, Dutch language development of especially Turkish and Moroccan children
already lagged behind by six months to more than a year. This lag did not disappear during
the primary education phase. On the contrary, the so-called Matthew effect (Stanovich, 1986;
Pfost, Hattie, Dörfler, & Artelt, 2014) seemed to occur: children of highly educated parents
(usually native-Dutch) benefit more from education and therefore make more progress than
children of poorly educated immigrant parents. The result was that Turkish and Moroccan
children were approximately two years behind in their language development at the end of
primary education, compared to children of highly educated Dutch parents (Driessen, 1995,
2004; Herweijer, 2009). More recent studies showed that lately immigrant children have been
catching up with their native-Dutch peers, but in an absolute sense they still lag behind
considerably (Driessen & Merry, 2014; Roeleveld, 2012).
In the past there have been several attempts in the Netherlands to integrate mother tongue
learning into the process of acquiring Dutch as a second language, both in the form of a few
small-scale experiments as in a national bilingual programme. These approaches were part of
the Educational Priority Policy (EPP) aiming at combatting educational disadvantage
resulting from social, economic and cultural factors in the home environment of the children.
They were inspired by the ideas of psycholinguist Cummins who proposed two hypotheses,
the interdependence hypothesis and the threshold hypothesis (Cummins, 1979; also see Dixon
et al., 2012). The former states that the development of proficiency in a second language is
partially a function of the type and level of competence already developed in the first
language. Underlying both languages are shared interdependent cognitive skills which

3. Language Choice and Language Proficiency of Immigrant Parents and Children 99
facilitate transmission from one to the other language. The latter hypothesis suggests that
threshold levels of linguistic competence can be identified which bilingual children must
attain in order to avoid cognitive disadvantages and to allow the potentially beneficial aspects
of bilingualism to influence their cognitive and academic functioning. The results of
numerous evaluations of bilingual programmes have led to mixed or contradictory
conclusions, not only in the Netherlands but also elsewhere (Kim, Hutchison, & Winsler,
2015; Söhn, 2004). Much seems to depend on the amount of exposure to the first language,
the status and usefulness of the first language in the host country, and the motivation to learn
the ‘mother tongue’. As to the latter, not only the motivation of the children is crucial, but
also – and probably more – that of their parents; what is detrimental here is the parents’
socioeconomic status (Soehl, 2016; Tran, 2010). The disappointing results of bilingual
programmes in the Netherlands in combination with the dwindling support in Dutch
Parliament made the Ministry of Education in 2004 decide to abolish bilingual education
altogether. The ministry’s decision was also based on the fact that there were insurmountable
practical problems, such as a shortage of qualified teachers who not only had satisfactory
proficiency in the immigrant language but also a workable command of Dutch, an absence of
adequate teaching materials geared at the specific dual language situation of immigrant
children living in the Netherlands, and the lack of willingness among the regular class
teachers to work together with the immigrant language teachers. Since the discontinuation of
bilingual education the only approach left is the Dutch-only immersion model, that is, with
the exception of bilingual and trilingual programmes with English, German, French or Frisian
as the other language(s) (Driessen, Krikhaar, De Graaff, Unsworth, Leest, Coppens, &
Wierenga, 2016).
In the Netherlands, very little is known regarding language choice and language use of
immigrants, especially when it concerns national large-scale data. Even less information is
available with respect to the intergenerational transmission of the mother tongue and the
correlation with Dutch language proficiency. Recently large-scale data have come available
which make it possible to study these relations in more depth. Two research questions are
leading in the present study:
1. To what extent do immigrant children speak the same language as their parents?
2. What effect does speaking the same language as their parents have on the children’s
Dutch language proficiency?
In the remainder of this article first of all an overview will be given of the sample
analysed, the instruments used and the variables selected. Thereafter, the results of the various
analyses will be presented. In the last section conclusions will be drawn.
METHOD
Sample
To answer the research questions data collected in the Dutch national large-scale
cohort study COOL5-18
were analysed. The data from the three measurement rounds that

4. Geert Driessen
100
took place in the school years 2007/08, 2010/11 and 2013/14 were combined (Driessen,
Elshof, Mulder, & Roeleveld, 2015). In this way smaller categories of pupils with
specific characteristics were optimally represented in the sample. Each of the first
two COOL measurement rounds included a total of 550 primary schools and 38000
pupils in grades 2, 5 and 8; in the third measurement round 440 schools and 29000 pupils
participated. The COOL sample consists of a core sample, which is representative for
all Dutch primary schools, and an additional sample of schools with large numbers
of disadvantaged pupils, especially immigrant children living in the large cities. This
latter sample was added to gauge the specific situation of this category of pupils as well as
possible.
Instruments and Variables
The present study focuses on children in grade 2 (5-6-year-olds) and their parents. The
reason for this selection is that information on language-related factors was only available for
this grade. The information analysed comes from the schools’ administrations (test results on
Dutch language proficiency) and a parent questionnaire (background characteristics of parents
and children). Despite the fact that the (written) parent questionnaire was accompanied by
explanations in Dutch, English, Arabic and Turkish, the response among immigrant and low-
SES parents was lower than among native-Dutch and higher-SES parents. To compensate
for this selection effect, the total sample was taken as the basis for the analyses, that is,
the representative sample plus the sample with the overrepresentation of disadvantaged
children.
In grade 2 a standardized language test was administered developed by CITO, the Dutch
National Institute for Educational Measurement (Lansink & Hemker, 2012). This test
measures aspects of language development (conceptual awareness) and beginning literacy
(metalinguistic awareness). After the first COOL measurement round an updated version of
this test was introduced (60 items; reliability: Cronbach’s alpha 0.87). Therefore the results of
the test administered in the second and third measurement round were not completely
comparable with the test administered in the first measurement round. (Although the
correlation r between the two versions was 0.92.) To arrive at comparable test results the
scores for each of the three measurement rounds were standardized into z scores, with a mean
of 0 and a standard deviation of 1.
The pupils’ parents completed an extensive questionnaire focussing on various features
of the home environment. Central was the home language of the parents. The parents were
asked to indicate which language they spoke the most among themselves. Categories used
were: Dutch; a Dutch regional language or dialect; a foreign language. For the present
analyses a selection was made of children whose parents reported that they spoke mostly a
foreign language among themselves.
In addition, regarding the children’s use of informal spoken languages the parents were
also asked to indicate which language their children spoke the most in a number of areas or
situations. Different areas were distinguished because a child does not necessarily speak the
same language in every area and different persons. The four areas discerned were: (1) with
the father, (2) with the mother, (3) with brothers and sisters, and (4) with peers. All areas refer
to informal language usage; the first three within the family, the last outside of the family.

5. Language Choice and Language Proficiency of Immigrant Parents and Children 101
Answer categories were: Dutch; a Dutch regional language or dialect; a foreign language. It
was calculated how often the child spoke the same language as their parents, in this case a
foreign language. Because not all of the four situations were applicable (e.g., when there was
no father because the child lived in a one-parent family or when there were no siblings) the
result was expressed as a relative measurement: 0%; 25%; 33%; 50%; 67%; 75%; 100%.
When the score is 0% this means that the child does not speak a foreign language in any of
the situations; a score of 100% on the other hand implies that the child speaks a foreign
language in all of the situations.
Furthermore, several control variables were constructed, all representing the situation of
the mothers and all of which can be seen as giving an indication of the level of integration
into Dutch society. It often is assumed that the more immigrant parents are integrated into a
host society, the better the educational chances of their children are (Driessen & Smit, 2007;
Dustmann, Frattini, & Lanzara, 2012). The focus was on the mothers, as they are the first and
most important language source for young children. In addition, as some 8 percent of the
children in this sample grows up in a single mother family, the number of missing values was
considerably lower.
 Country of birth. Whether the mother was born in the Netherlands or abroad.
 Length of stay. The number of years she resides in the Netherlands, with
categories: (1) less than 3 years; (2) 3-5 years; (3) 6-9 years; (4) 10 or more years;
(5) always.
 Level of education. The highest level achieved, with categories: (1) junior vocational
education; (2) general secondary education and pre-university education; (3) senior
secondary vocational education; (4) higher professional education and university
education.
 Employment. Whether the mother has paid work for at least 12 hours per week or
not.
 Command of the Dutch language. Self-rating scales (4 items) on the basis of Clark’s
(1981) so-called Can-Do scales with regard to four language modalities:
comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing. The answer categories were: (1) no
command to moderate command; (2) good command; (3) very good command. On
the basis of the responses, a mean total score was calculated, which can be
interpreted in terms of the above given three answer categories (reliability:
Cronbach’s alpha 0.97).
In Table 1 descriptive statistics for the various variables are presented. As a point
of reference the statistics for the children of a foreign language speaking parents are
compared with those of the children of Dutch speaking parents. (As the focus in this
study is on immigrant children the children of parents who speak a Dutch regional language
or dialect are omitted here.) The table also gives the level of significance (p) and
the correlation coefficient eta. According to the rule of thumb provided by Cohen (1988)
an eta of 0.10 indicates a small effect, an eta of 0.30 a medium effect, and an eta of
0.50 a large effect.

6. Geert Driessen
102
Table 1. Descriptives relevant variables; foreign language speaking parents (n = 2517)
versus Dutch language speaking parents (n = 13917) (means)
Foreign language Dutch language eta
Country of birth Netherlands mother (%) 9.6 92.9 0.75***
Length of stay mother 3.7 4.9 0.66***
Foreign language Dutch language eta
Level of education mother 2.0 3.0 0.31***
Paid work mother (%) 32.8 73.0 0.31***
Command of Dutch mother 1.7 2.7 0.59***
Dutch language proficiency child -0.57 0.24 0.29***
*** p < 0.001.
Less than 10 percent of the mothers who speak a foreign language were born in the
Netherlands. In contrast, some 7 percent of the mothers who speak Dutch were born abroad.
On average, most mothers who speak a foreign language have been living in the Netherlands
for 10 years or more, while almost all of the mothers who speak Dutch have always lived in
the Netherlands. Remarkable differences exist regarding educational level. The mothers who
speak a foreign language have attained a full level lower than the mothers who speak Dutch.
Less than one third of the mothers who speak a foreign language are in a paid job, while for
their Dutch speaking counterparts this is nearly three quarters. The command of the Dutch
language for the a foreign language speaking mothers on average amounts to less than
moderate; for the mothers who normally speak Dutch at home the level is very well. With
regard to the children’s Dutch language proficiency it should be remembered that the original
test scores have been transformed into standardized z scores with a mean of 0 and standard
deviation of 1, and furthermore that these scores were computed for the total sample; here the
children of parents who speak a Dutch regional language or dialect were omitted. Table 1
shows that the children of parents who speak a foreign language achieve more than half a
standard deviation (-0.57) below the average of the total sample, while children of parents
who speak Dutch achieve nearly one fourth (0.24) above the average. The difference between
the two categories amounts to no less than more than three quarters of a standard deviation
(0.24 + 0.57 = 0.81). The column under p shows that all differences are highly significant,
while the eta’s all are medium to very large.
RESULTS
The Language of Parents and Children
Table 2 presents the answer to the first research question, namely how often children of a
foreign language speaking parents also speak that language. In the column under % we see
that almost one third (32.3%) of the children do not speak a foreign language in any of the
four situations; more than one fifth (22.2%) speaks a foreign language in half of the
situations. A total of nearly 45 percent of the 2517 children speak a foreign language in half
or more of the situations. Thus, children of a foreign language speaking parents keep on using
that language relatively often.

7. Language Choice and Language Proficiency of Immigrant Parents and Children 103
Table 2. Number of times children of a foreign language speaking parents also speak a
foreign language (in %; n = 2517) and language proficiency Dutch (means)
Number of situations % Proficiency Dutch
0% 32.3 -0.44
25% 17.0 -0.52
33% 5.8 -0.57
50% 22.2 -0.58
67% 4.9 -0.74
75% 9.9 -0.77
100% 7.7 -0.84
Total 100.0 -0.57#
eta = 0.15 r = -0.14***
#
sd = 0.88; *** p < 0.001.
Language Use and Language Proficiency
Table 2 also provides an answer to the second research question, regarding the correlation
between the number of times children speak a foreign language and their Dutch language
proficiency. The test scores in the column Proficiency Dutch reveal a (negative) trend that the
more often the children speak a foreign language the lower their proficiency in Dutch is. The
difference between the children who do not speak a foreign language in any of the situations
and the children who speak that language in all of the situations is 0.40, which is nearly half
of a standard deviation for this category (0.88) and thus is substantive. In addition to the eta
coefficient the table also presents the r coefficient; the difference between both correlation
estimates gives an indication as to whether the correlation deviates from linearity. As the two
coefficients are almost identical it is clear that the relation between speaking a foreign
language and proficiency Dutch is linear.
The children’s proficiency in the language of the host country, in this study Dutch, to a
certain extent depends on a number of factors at the level of the family (e.g., Carrington &
Luke, 1997; Hattie, 2009; White & Kaufman, 1997). In the COOL study several of these
characteristics are available, especially in the domains of social and linguistic capital
(Bourdieu, 1997; Huang & Liang, 2016). In Table 3 the inter correlations between all of these
factors and the children’s language use and language proficiency are presented. Central are
the correlations for proficiency Dutch in the bottom line. With the rule of thumb provided by
Cohen (1988) in mind, it can be said that there is a relevant correlation, albeit only between
‘small’ and ‘moderate’ with the mother’s educational level (0.19), the mother’s command of
Dutch (0.16), and the number of times the child speaks the foreign language (-0.14). This
means that the higher the level of education, the better the command of Dutch and the less a
foreign language is spoken, the greater the child’s proficiency in Dutch. Whether the mother
is born in the Netherlands, her length of residence in the Netherlands, and whether she has a
paid job is of no relevance.

8. Geert Driessen
104
Table 3. Correlations background variables and language proficiency (r)
Country of
birth
Length of
stay
Education
Paid
work
Command
Dutch
Foreign
language
Length of stay 0.41***
Education 0.17*** -0.03
Paid work 0.18*** 0.15*** 0.23***
Command
Dutch
0.47*** 0.42*** 0.36*** 0.28***
Foreign
language
-0.08*** -0.23*** -0.05** -0.09*** -0.23***
Proficiency
Dutch
0.06** 0.09*** 0.19*** 0.10*** 0.16*** -0.14***
*** p < 0.001, ** p < 0.01.
In a final analysis of covariance the analysis that has been reported in Table 2 was
repeated, but now with a correction for the two variables that showed to be relevant in Table
3, namely mother’s education and mother’s command of Dutch. The left column of Table 4
shows the uncorrected proficiency scores (also see Table 2), the right column the corrected
scores.
Table 4. Language proficiency according to number of times children speak a
foreign language, uncorrected and corrected for mothers’ education and
command of Dutch (means)
Proficiency Dutch
Number of situations Uncorrected Corrected
0% -0.44 -0.47
25% -0.52 -0.56
33% -0.57 -0.58
50% -0.58 -0.54
67% -0.74 -0.72
75% -0.77 -0.79
100% -0.84 -0.77
eta = 0.15 beta = 0.13
What the estimates in Table 4 clearly show is that for the earlier found negative effect of
speaking a foreign language it hardly matters whether the mother has attained a high or a low
level of education and whether her command of Dutch is poor or very well: the language
proficiency scores of the children remain virtually the same. This is supported by the fact that
the eta coefficient (that is the uncorrected effect) of speaking a foreign language hardly
differs from the beta coefficient (or the corrected effect).

9. Language Choice and Language Proficiency of Immigrant Parents and Children 105
CONCLUSION
This study aimed at answering two questions. First, to what extent do immigrant children
speak the same language as their parents? The analyses showed that almost one third of the
children do not speak their mother tongue in any of the situations discerned, and nearly 45
percent does so in at least half of the situations. Thus, children of a foreign language speaking
parents keep on using that language relatively often. Second, what effect does speaking the
same language as their parents have on the children’s Dutch language proficiency? The
findings point to a tendency that the more often the children speak their mother tongue
the lower their level of Dutch is. This negative effect remains after correcting for the
mother’s educational level and command of Dutch. Some caution is warranted, however,
as this relation may not be completely causal. Variables not included in this study
might be correlated with both language use and language proficiency, such as preschool
education.
In education, immigrant children often lag far behind their native peers, especially
regarding their proficiency in Dutch. The findings of this study suggest that this delay is
greater for children who speak their mother tongue. Because this problem manifests itself
already at a very early age it is important to also take measures at an early stage (Roeleveld,
2012). In the Dutch Educational Priority Policy (EPP) various measures have been
implemented to prevent or combat educational disadvantage of low-SES and immigrant
children, regrettably without much success (Driessen 2012). Several recent studies revealed
that Early Childhood Education (ECE) programmes have failed to result in any effect
whatsoever (e.g., Fukkink, Jilink, & Oostdam, 2015). These programmes are the core of the
EPP and are specifically designed to prevent early language delays of disadvantaged children.
As most of the ECE programmes are carried out in institutions such as day care centres, play
groups and nursery schools, some researchers reason that a more direct and active link with
the home situation is necessary (Tavecchio & Oostdam, 2013). It is argued that parents need
to be taught how to play and interact with their children, and in addition that the parents
themselves need to attend courses to improve their mastery of Dutch. The question is whether
the latter really helps, as the findings from the present study suggest that the mothers’
command of Dutch hardly affects the children’s language proficiency (r = 0.16). Van den
Branden and Verhelst (2008) are of the opinion that what really matters with regard to
combatting language delays is ‘literacy,’ that is, the decontextualised language used in
schools (Baker, 2001), and not language in general. For that reason a concentrated approach
in school is needed. The language of school can best be learned in school. This is in
agreement with the findings from a recent large-scale experiment in Dutch primary schools
with so-called transition classes. Contrary to the results of most interventions implemented
under the EPP, such classes showed positive effects (Mulder, Van der Veen, Derriks, &
Elshof, 2012). In a transition class children receive concentrated language education in a
separate class for the period of one school year, for instance before they start in grade 1. After
that year they continue on in a regular class. It is recommended, however, that the children
receive extra attention after the transition year, and that the transition class should be viewed
as part of an integral approach. Indeed, the language development of immigrant children
should be monitored throughout their career in primary education, and adequate help should
be provided whenever needed.

10. Geert Driessen
106
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