“Effect of economic, social and cultural status of students on English language learning and territorial differences”

The relationship between socio-economic status and school performance is a much-debated research topic of international interest. In Italy, the social and economic distance between north and south represents a historical issue, which inevitably extends to the educational level. Results in the INVALSI tests constantly confirm this evidence. In line with recent contributions (Bagnarol and Donno 2020; Russo et al. 2020) showing that needed to compare the socio-economic level (ESCS) with the educational gap likening different groups of regions, in this study, we want to examine how much the ESCS-s, which refers to the socio-economic background of the student, affect the differences in learning the English language. ECSC is a composite measure of parental information (profession and educational level) and domestic supplies information. According to other investigations, ESCS-s produces a significant effect on student performance on Italian and mathematics tests (Di Sano e Balenzano, 2021). Therefore, in this study, we investigate the influence of the ESCS-s indicator on the English reading (R) and listening (L) tests, comparing the different groups of Italian regions (north-west, north-east, center, south, south, and islands). For greater clarity, we investigate the internal differences (north-west, northeast, center, south, south, and islands), also relating them to the origin and the gender of the students. This study bases the analysis on the sample data of grade 8 students who participated in the INVALSI English, reading (R), and listening (L) tests for the school year 2018/2019. Weighted data were used to take into account the representativeness of the sample. Results show significant differences among the groups of regions (north-west, northeast, center, south, south, and islands), with the northeast group reaching the highest results in both reading (R) and listening (L) tests.). There are no significant differences between immigrants and Italians in the reading tests (R). In conclusion, ESCS-s has a significant effect on students' performance on INVALSI English tests, both for listening (L) and reading (R) in all the set of regions. Being an immigrant does not seem to weigh excessively on learning the English language, especially in the northeast of Italy, while being female seems to represent an advantage in all territorial groups.