Multilinguals often show similarities in their language use and skills. They are also, at least to some extent, able to transfer their linguistic competence across languages (Marx 2020, Riehl et al. 2018). So far, however, the majority of language acquisition research has focused on one single language (that is, the language of school education, a foreign language, or a heritage language). This is especially true for newly arrived students.

In order to fill this gap, the current project will investigate cross-linguistic parallels in reading skills and vocabulary size between the school language German and the foreign language English.

The aim of this project is to pilot materials and gain initial insights into the cross-linguistic transversality and transfer of language skills that will be expanded on in future projects.