This volume examines the specific effects that schools have on the performance of immigrant students and linguistic minority groups. Especially in the European context this study fills a gap in examining the effects that schools have on these students' performance and performance differentiation, taking into account school related factors such as resources and teachers, and the influence of other variables like mother tongue and socioeconomic status. This report on an ongoing research project in Portugal examines state schools within the same district, in the same tests over the same assessment period. The study is based on the following set of relationships: between schools that administer proficiency tests to their non-native students; schools that do not use such tests; and schools with verifiable support programs (including physical and digital materials); and between the effect of the school and the predictive values of the nationality, mother tongue and socioeconomic status variables on the performance of non-native students of Portuguese.

Based on previous studies in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), this book provides new information and pioneering research for academicians, educational technicians, language test developers, psychologists and second language researchers. It examines the cases of learning and testing in languages other than English (as a second language, L2), specifically focusing on the Portuguese case. This book also reinterprets the immigrants populations and their schooling (and concepts) considering the recent immigration changes. It encourages research in L2 research, focusing on other minorities and European contexts, including the refugees argument that is affecting/reinforcing European society. It reflects on the expected cognitive processing difference according to the mother tongues of children and their cognitive map structures. The author selects literature concerning the disproportions among L2 learners and the commonly saturated focus on English as a L2. This book is essentially evidence-based, providing specific data and statistical analyses to understand the size of disproportions showed by the professional perceptions and the risk of underrepresented minorities that could be misled inside host schools in Europe.