Since 2015, many minors have come to Germany. With the significant increase in immigration, scientific and didactic interest in the language skills of these young people has also grown, especially in recent times. Despite its relevance and although the proportion of all children and young people of school age in North Rhine-Westphalia now stands at 15% (cf. Destatis, 2025), it receives little attention in research in Germany.

The SpraNZiR project addressed this gap. Its aim was to investigate the language skills of newly arrived students. In addition to German, the focus was also on English as a foreign language. The data collection in schools was preceded by two preparatory project components: a scoping review (Goltsev & von Dewitz, 2023) and an analysis of existing data from the NEPS project (Caspari & Marx, 2022). These steps not only revealed clear gaps in data and research but also showed a high degree of heterogeneity within the group of new immigrants, necessitating studies with more detailed questionnaires and examinations of individual skills.

Therefore, from 2021 to 2024, the language skills of 344 students in grades 5 to 8 who attended regular classes at German schools in North Rhine-Westphalia were assessed. 115 of them had immigrated to Germany from different countries at school age, meaning they had not benefited from The remaining students attended the same classes but had already started school in Germany and thus formed the comparison group for the study. In this comparison group, about half of all students spoke a non-German family language, which corresponded to the comparison group of the rest of the student population.

A detailed questionnaire recorded the language skills and countries of origin of the individual children and young people, as well as their use of languages at school and at home. Three established language proficiency tests examined reading skills in German and vocabulary performance in German and English. In addition, test instruments for examining language awareness were tested for future studies. 

Initial analyses of the data revealed large differences in performance between the newly immigrated students and the comparison group, which remained consistent throughout the study period. 

A detailed description of methods, data, and study results can be found in the final report of the project (Marx et al., 2024). The data of the project is available to researchers for further analysis (Marx et al., 2025). 

We would like to thank all students, their parents, and schools for participating in our study. 

Projects

• Reading Skills of Newly Arrived Secondary School Students
• Language Awareness of Newly Arrived Secondary
• Cross-linguistic Skills of Newly Arrived Students
• Vocabulary Knowledge of Newly Arrived Secondary School Students
• Secondary analysis of the NEPS data on the linguistic development of newly arrived students
• Scoping review: development of linguistic and subject competencies of newly arrived students
• Self-report questionnaire for collecting demographic and language-related information from newly arrived students