Multilinguals have cross-linguistic skills in addition to their proficiencies in each of their languages. In particular, these cross-linguistic skills include multilinguals’ so-called language awareness that will be investigated in the current project. There are various definitions for language awareness, such as the one used by the National Congress on Language Education (1985): "Language awareness is a person's sensitivity to and conscious perception of the nature of language and its role in human life" (for an overview, see e.g. Tajmel 2017).

The current project investigates newly arrived students’ cross-linguistic skills such as language awareness in comparison to those of mainstream students. This will be assessed using both a language awareness test developed by the research team as well as the instrument MSK 9-12 (cf. Hofer/Jessner 2019).