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 newly arrived 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 arrived in 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) new data will be collected on various language skills of students in secondary school. The participants are newly arrived students and a comparison group (i. e. students attending German schools since the beginning of Grade 1).

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

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