Language Skills of Newly Immigrated Students

Since 2015, the increased migration of school-aged children to Germany has sparked heightened national interest in their language skills. Despite the size of this population (in some states, they comprise over 10 percent of the student population, cf. School Statistics 2019, NRW), they have received little attention in previous studies.

The current project investigates language skills of immigrated students in German (the language of schooling) and English (the first foreign language). Additionally, the project investigates how their skills are interrelated across languages. Different methods and data sets will be used to answer this question:

• a scoping review examined the state of research on the language development of students recently immigrated to German-speaking countries,
• a secondary data analysis of Germany’s large-scale longitudinal NEPS database considers, for the first time, the learning trajectories, and
• in a number of subprojects (see below), data will be collected on various language skills of approximately 100 newly immigrated and mainstream students (grades 5 to 8) in secondary schools in NRW.

Together, these projects will provide first insights into the language skills of immigrated students vis-à-vis their non-immigrated peers, and to serve as a basis for further projects.