Immigration boosts Canada's illiteracy rate

Immigrants make up a large percentage of Canada's illiterate population. Findings in the Southam Literacy Survey also cast doubt on the effectiveness of immigrant language courses given an estimated 100,000 immigrants this year.

Immigration is a mixed blessing for literacy in Canada.

The Southam survey discovered large-scale immigration accounts for about one million of Canada's 4.5 million adult functional illiterates. Thirty-five per cent of foreign-born residents in the survey were unable to handle everyday literacy tasks; this rises to 42 per cent when adults from the U.S. and British Isles are excluded.

But the grown-up children of these immigrants, born in Canada, score higher in literacy than longer-established Canadians.

In addition, the three-million-plus immigrants now living in Canada barely nudge the national illiteracy level upwards, from 22 per cent for native-born residents by themselves to 24 per cent overall.

However, other information strongly suggests the illiteracy rate has risen sharply among immigrants since 1980.

"Our findings suggest that the literacy problem associated with immigration eventually can work itself out. The message to government would be: get them young and get them into school," comments Dr. Paul Nesbitt, a psychologist with The Creative Research Group.

The survey also adds new fuel to a decades-old controversy about the effects of multi-culturalism by taking a closer look at nearly 300 respondents who spoke more than one language as children.

Illiteracy is high among this multilingual group -- 49 per cent for foreign born and 33 per cent for Canadian born.

These findings appear to clash with current educational theories that claim multilingualism at home and heritage languages at school improve literacy in both languages if carefully done.

"The data certainly suggests that multi-culturalism and heritage languages are not a good thing automatically," says Nesbitt. "But it does not show what happens for children from literate, upper-middle-class homes who get sent off to heritage language classes." Other findings:

• While immigrants are roughly one in five— 22 per cent -- of all functional illiterates on a national scale, they account for roughly one-third of Ontario's illiterates and almost none of Quebec's. Immigrants are also a high percentage of Alberta's illiterates but the estimate of 38 per cent has large margins of error because of the small sample size;

• Any high school education dramatically reduces illiteracy among immigrants, as it also does for native-born Canadians. Yet 29 per cent of the foreign-born in the survey who claimed some university education actually tested as functionally illiterate, contrasted to six per cent of those Canadian born;

• Schooling in Canada is much better for reducing illiteracy than schooling elsewhere;

• English spoken in the home or learned before starting school consistently produces higher literacy levels than French or all other languages. But this finding is colored by the high illiteracy rate among older French Canadians and older immigrants.

Immigration also dramatically shifts the balance of illiteracy away from small towns and rural Canada and into the big urban centres.

Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver together are home to functional illiterates in about equal proportion to their 30-per-cent share of Canada's total population. But the three cities contain more than half of all immigrant illiterates.

By contrast, communities of less than 10,000 people account for one-quarter of the nation's population but contain 32 per cent of all native-born illiterates and only 10 per cent of the foreign-born.

The findings also cast renewed doubt on the effectiveness of immigrant language courses given to an estimated 100,000 immigrants this year. Functional illiteracy runs at 50 per cent among foreign-born multilinguals in the Southam survey, whether they took some sort of language course or not.