Introduction

Academic resilience is typically defined as the ability of students from disadvantaged backgrounds to achieve high academic performance (Rudd et al., 2021; Ye et al., 2021). In resilient research, immigrant students, frequently from families with lower socio-economic status (SES) and struggling with cultural and language barriers in unfamiliar environments, are commonly identified as disadvantaged (Anagnostaki et al., 2016). Enhancing the academic resilience of immigrant students is crucial not just for their individual growth but also for the socio-economic and cultural dynamism of the countries they reside in.

The growing population of immigrant students, particularly in European countries, has spurred heightened interest in identifying protective factors that foster academic resilience (Gabrielli et al., 2022; Özdemir & Özdemir, 2020). Recent focus has been on those factors that are malleable and related to the educational environment, including schools and teachers. While some studies have considered individual characteristics like language attitude and immigrant generation (e.g., Martin et al., 2022), there is a notable gap in understanding how the diversity in language and cultural backgrounds among immigrant students affects their academic resilience.

To address this research gap, this present study investigates the influence of instructional quality on immigrant students’ academic resilience, while considering their intercultural communication competence and language distance between their native and host country languages. By doing so, it seeks to provide a more nuanced understanding of how educational practices can be tailored to support the unique needs of immigrant students. This research is not only timely but also essential for informing educational policies and practices in increasingly multicultural European societies.

Methods To address the unique challenges faced by immigrant students, such as language barriers and the necessity to learn other subjects in a non-native language, this study employs data from the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The 2018 cycle, with its primary focus on reading, provides a pertinent dataset for this investigation. The sample comprises 10,885 low-SES immigrant students, with an average age of 15.79 and 50.37% being female. These students were distributed across 1,778 schools in 26 member countries of the European Union (excluding Cyprus), in addition to three European Economic Area countries and the United Kingdom. This study adopted the conceptualization of academic resilience from Martin et al. (2022). It defines high achievers as students ranking in the top 25% in national reading performance and low SES backgrounds as those in the bottom 25% of economic, social, and cultural status (ESCS) within their respective country. Instructional quality is derived from student questionnaire, including questions about classroom management, supportive classroom environment, and cognitive activation. Intercultural communication competence is assessed through students’ ratings of seven statements related to cross-cultural conversation. Additionally, the linguistic distance between the language spoken at home and the PISA assessment language is calculated using a lexical-phonological measure of linguistic proximity developed in the context of the Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP; Wichmann et al., 2022). For the analyses, multilevel probit regression was employed to investigate the effect of instructional quality, intercultural communication competence, and language distance on academic resilience at both student and school levels. The analyses were conducted using Mplus version 8.8 (Muthén & Muthén, 1998-2017) by employing the weighted least square mean and variance adjusted (WLSMV) estimators. However, it is important to note that WLSMV does not support country-level clustering (e.g., “ Type = Twolevel complex ” command in Mplus) or multilevel multigroup models in Mplus. To address this limitation and explore variations across countries, we conducted a series of models where the country is treated as a covariate at the individual level.

Preliminary Results and Discussion The preliminary results show that all three aspects of instructional quality significantly predict academic resilience at the student level, but not at the school level. A similar trend is observed for student’s intercultural communication competence. In contrast, the impact of language distance on academic resilience is evident only at the school level. These findings imply that enhancing the instructional quality and intercultural communication competence at the individual level may be important for improving academic resilience, while addressing language distance may likely require broader interventions at the school level. Comparisons across countries reveal that Slovenia, Portugal, and Romania have the highest percentages of resilient immigrant students with 28.79%, 23.82%, and 18.52%, respectively. The influence of instructional quality and intercultural communication is relatively consistent across countries. However, the influence of language distance varies significantly at the school level. Luxembourg shows the strongest association (β = -.187, p = .000), while Spain demonstrates the weakest (β = -.103, p = .035). These findings underscore the importance of considering both individual and school-level factors in fostering academic resilience among immigrant students.

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