Bilingual Canadian more likely to be literate

Bilingual Canadians are only two-thirds as likely to be functionally illiterate as Canadians generally— 16 per cent as opposed to the national average of 24 per cent.

Anglophones appear to benefit more from bilingualism than francophones, with an illiteracy rate of only nine per cent compared to 23 percent for all English-speaking adults.

The illiteracy rate also plunged among bilingual francophones, from 29 per cent of all francophones to 20 per cent for bilingual ones.

But the apparent literacy advantages of bilingualism may really be linked to the higher education and socio-economic status of the 253 adults surveyed who said they regularly read newspapers, magazines or books in the other official language. More than half of bilingual Canadians went beyond high school compared to less than one-third of unilinguals.

"This is a select group," says Dr. Paul Nesbitt of The Creative Research Group. "They're better educated, have higher incomes and are more literate generally." Nesbitt says the survey wasn't large enough in scope to examine the effect of language immersion classes on literacy. Some scholars have speculated recently that immersion may produce children with poor literacy in both official languages.

"You'd need a special study to answer those questions, comparing kids of the same socioeconomic class who take immersion courses with those who don't." But the major federal agency funding such research has rejected a request to make Canada part of a 40-nation project studying many aspects of literacy in school children. An investigation of the effects of bilingualism was a key Canadian aspect of the $1-million proposal to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council by researcher Jeffrey Bulcock of Newfoundland's Memorial University.

"This would have been the first look at assessing French immersion on a national scale," Bulcock says. The council, relying on anonymous referees from the United States, rejected the request as premature.

In the 1986-87 school year, 200,000 children —or 4.3 per cent of all students—enrolled in French immersion programs across Canada.

The Southam survey found 12 per cent of Canadians said they were bilingual enough to read material in the other official language at least monthly. (In the 1981 census, 15.3 per cent of Canadians said they were bilingual.) Inter viewers also found francophones living outside Quebec—and anglophones inside Quebec— almost always chose to do the survey in the dominant language of their province. This meant francophones in the Prairies, for example, would be recorded as English speaking.