Both for the first language (L1) and for all additional languages (L2 or L3), grammatical knowledge plays a vital role in understanding texts (e.g., Grabe, 2005). However, little is known about the development and interaction of grammar and reading comprehension in beginning foreign language learning, especially with respect to children with a minority language background. This longitudinal study, therefore, examined minority and majority language children’s English grammar and reading comprehension skills. The children attended a German-English partial immersion primary school and were tested at the end of Grades 3 and 4. As expected, we found grammar to affect reading comprehension but also reverse effects. Most importantly, the results did not reveal any differences between the two language groups, irrespective of the test. Therefore, immersion primary school programs seem to be suitable for minority language children, and these children do not automatically represent an at-risk group for foreign language learning.

This study explores parallels and differences in the comprehension of wh-questions and relative clauses between early foreign-language (FL) learners and monolingual children. We test for (a) effects of syntactic first-language (L1) transfer, (b) the impact of input on syntactic development, and (c) the impact of individual differences on early FL syntactic development. We compare the results to findings in child second language (L2) naturalistic acquisition and adult FL acquisition. Following work on adult FL acquisition, we carried out a picture-based interpretation task with 243 child FL learners in fourth grade at different regular, partial, and high-immersion schools in Germany plus 68 monolingual English children aged 5 to 8 years as controls. The child FL learners display a strong subject-first preference but do not appear to use the L1 syntax in comprehension. Input differences across different schools affect overall accuracy, with students at high-immersion FL schools catching up to monolingual performance within 4 years of learning. Finally, phonological awareness is implicated in both early FL learning and naturalistic child L2 development. These findings suggest that early FL development resembles child L2 acquisition in speed and effects of individual factors, yet is different from adult FL acquisition due to the absence of L1 transfer effects.

Few studies have examined the production of English vowels by native speakers of languages with vowel inventories as large as, or larger than, English. Danish is such a language, whose vowels are unevenly distributed in the vowel space, with a densely populated upper portion and a sparsely populated lower portion of the vowel space. This paper reports on acoustic comparisons of British English vowels as produced by ten native speakers of British English and of Danish, and of Danish vowels as produced by ten native speakers of Danish. Danish and English vowels were produced in CVC syllables in a variety of consonantal contexts. Acoustic analyses revealed temporal, spectral, and dynamic differences between the vowels produced by the speaker groups. The results of this study suggest that comparisons of vowels across languages, as well as analyses of the productions of non-native speakers, are incomplete and may even be misleading unless the effects of consonantal context are taken into account. The results of this study also provide an interesting test case for Flege’s speech learning model, which makes predictions concerning the learnability of foreign language vowels based on their degree of difference from native language categories.

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This paper had two aims: a) to provide a review of studies investigating how children with migration backgrounds perform in tests examining their skills in the majority language of a country as well as their skills in a 3rd language learnt either in regular language-as-subjects lessons or in bilingual programmes such as those following the immersion approach, and b) to present the results of a pilot study investigating how primary school children with and without migration backgrounds enrolled in a partial immersion programme in Germany performed in tests examining their skills in the ambient language German and in the immersion language English. The review of previous research suggested that compared to children without a migration background, children with a migration background living in Germany often achieve relatively poor results in studies examining their skills in the ambient language German. In studies examining migrant children's skills in a new language such as English learnt in foreign language classrooms or in a bilingual secondary school setting, students with migrant backgrounds have, on the other hand, sometimes been found to perform equally well as or even better than students without a migration background. However, there is a paucity of studies examining migrant children's academic achievement in primary schools with bilingual programmes. The pilot study presented here examined children in primary grades 1 to 4 who were enrolled in a partial immersion programme in Germany and who participated in tests examining their cognitive abilities, their literacy skills in the ambient language German and the immersion language English as well as their comprehension of English vocabulary and grammar. The results obtained in the different tests suggest that primary school immersion programmes may not only be suitable for children without, but also for children with migration backgrounds, including children with migration backgrounds whose parents are less inclined to education.