Inmigración, lengua y rendimiento académico en España. Una revisión sistemática de la literatura

Since the nineties, publications that deal with the relationships between immigration, proficiency in the language of instruction and academic performance of children of immigrants have multiplied in Spain. The majority defend the linguistic disadvantage hypothesis when explaining the poorer performance of these students. This paper reviews this literature within the Spanish context in order to assess its contributions, limitations and gaps. Despite the advances, it is concluded that the absence of research that simultaneously measures the proficiency in the language of instruction and the academic performance precludes rigorous empirical knowledge of such relationship and, hence, the contrast of the aforementioned hypothesis. The size of both the samples and the subsamples of the national origin groups, as well as a proper control for certain relevant variables, are pointed out as other research challenges.