The effect of first language and education on literacy, employment and income: An analysis from the Adult Literacy and Life Skills survey

1. Introduction

1.1: Purpose

Over the last decade there has been increased immigration to New Zealand from a wider range of countries. This has led to an increase in the proportion of New Zealanders with English as an additional language.

An analysis of the effects of skills and qualifications on wages found that people with English as an additional language earned less than those with English as a first language, even when they have the same level of qualifications and English-based numeracy and literacy (Earle, 2009).

This report looks further at the effect of having a first language other than English on New Zealanders’ English-based literacy and numeracy skills, employment and income.

1.2: The Adult Literacy and Life Skills survey

The Adult Literacy and Life Skills (ALL) survey directly measured the literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills of New Zealanders aged 16 to 65 in 2006. The tests were administered in English. The survey also collected extensive background information on education, employment, income and other areas.

The ALL survey tested skills across four domains:

• Prose literacy – the ability to read continuous texts, such as news stories and instruction manuals
• Document literacy – the ability to read discontinuous texts, such as maps and timetables
• Numeracy – the ability to read and work with numeric information
• Problem solving – the ability to reason in situations where no routine procedure exists.
  

The tests were designed to assess skills across the full range of competency, from limited to highly developed skills. However, the tests were designed to cover general, cognitive skill levels and did not attempt to assess specialist knowledge and skills (see Satherley and Lawes, 2007).

In this report, the literacy and numeracy scores have been standardised across the New Zealand population aged 16 to 65 to have a mean of 0 and standard deviation of 1. This enables more valid comparison of results between skill domains.

The survey also included an extensive background questionnaire. The questionnaire included information on the respondents’ education, first languages, parents’ occupations and education, labour force activities (including wages) and personal and household income.

The survey achieved a total sample of 7,131 people. Of these 6,049 were aged 25 and over. And of those 25 and over, 977 had learnt English as an additional language.

Full details of the variables used in this report and the full results of the regression models can be found in Appendix B    .

1.3: Scope

This report starts with a description of the characteristics of New Zealanders with English as a second language, including age, gender and time spent in New Zealand. This is followed by a discussion of previous research on English language proficiency, employment and income.

There are three sections that present new analysis from the ALL survey. The first looks at the distribution of education and skills for New Zealanders with and without English as a first language and includes an estimate of the average effect of having English as an additional language on English-based literacy and numeracy.

The second section looks at the relationship of having English as an additional language to employment measures. These measures include participation in the labour force, unemployment, being self-employed, working full- or part-time and working in a skilled job.  The section explores the extent to which a relationship remains once differences in English-based literacy and numeracy are accounted for.

The third looks at income and explores the relationship to having English as an additional language. The section looks at hourly wages, total personal income and equivalent household income. This section also explores the extent to which a relationship remains once differences in English-based literacy and numeracy are accounted for.

Most of the analysis in this report focuses on people aged 25 to 65. This removes younger people who are still studying towards a tertiary qualification and ensures that the results for tertiary qualifications are more representative of respondents’ full educational attainment. It also avoids the issue of international students, discussed below.

1.4: Limitations

While the ALL survey provides new and extensive data in a number of areas it also has some limitations.

A major limitation is that the survey is cross-sectional, point-in-time view of the population. This limits the ability to comment on changes that happen for individuals across their lifetimes. In particular, the survey does not provide meaningful information on the effect of the length of time spent in New Zealand on skills, employment and income.

While length of time in New Zealand is recorded in the survey, the measure represents which immigration policy was in place at the time of arrival and is correlated with the age of the respondent. It is best interpreted as representing immigrant cohorts. Immigration policy has been very dynamic in New Zealand over the last 20 years¹, so the skills, education, language and country characteristics of cohorts arriving at different times are quite different. Furthermore, over a longish period of time, people who arrived in earlier years are going to be older on average than those who arrived more recently. Education, skills, employment and income all have significant relationships to age.²

The other major limitation of the ALL data is that it does not report which immigration stream people have arrived in the country through. This significantly limits any conclusions that can be drawn from this report about the efficacy of immigration policies. The ALL survey also did not specifically ask about the residency status of respondents. However, the sample population is drawn from people who are usually resident in private households. This effectively excludes those international students and temporary migrant workers who are in the country for short periods of time and/or are living in temporary accommodation or halls of residence.

The ALL survey does include international students here on a longer-term basis. The proportion of people in the target age group of 16 to 65 with English as an additional language whose labour force status was ‘student’ was 19 percent, compared with 7 percent of those with English as a first language. International students are a significant part of New Zealand’s permanent and long term migration flows and the majority come from non-English speaking backgrounds. Since 2005, they have been an increasingly important target for permanent immigration, with policies enabling them to apply for permanent residence following study (Harkess et al, 2009). However, the disproportionate number of international students within the population of people with English as an additional language confounds the outcome measures of employment and income. Restricting the population of interest to people aged 25 to 65 removes most of the students. The proportions drop to 4 percent and 2 percent of each language group, respectively. This provides better comparison of employment and income between people with and without English as a first language.

Footnotes

1. See Merwood (2008) for a detailed list of immigration policy changes since 1986.
   
2. The number of years since arriving in New Zealand has a correlation coefficient with the current age of the respondent of 0.49 for people aged 25 to 65. It also has a correlation coefficient with the age at arrival of -0.71.