Vocabulary development in German-Turkish language contact

Montanari, Elke; Abel, Roman

doi:10.2307/j.ctvcm4frz.24

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“…The first studies investigating L2 development in school-age refugee children within the German school context highlight the "difficulties in choosing and applying language assessment tools in the absence of valid norms or of comparable L2 reference groups" (Hamann et al 2020(Hamann et al , p. 1377. In a study with primary school-age refugees (ages 10;0-17;0), Montanari and Abel (2017) registered a significant gap in the performance of refugees relative to their heritage peers on measures assessing vocabulary development and (picture-based) essay-writing. In the same vein, Abed Ibrahim et al (2020) and Hamann et al (2020) investigated a group of younger school-age refugees (ages 6;6-12;8) and found significant deficits in the performance of refugees on measures of vocabulary and morphosyntax relative to younger heritage bilinguals, even on the LiSe-DaZ test (Schulz and Tracy 2011), which offers bilingual norms for eL2 children.…”

Section: Bilingualism and Dldmentioning

confidence: 99%

Special Needs Assessment in Bilingual School-Age Children in Germany

2021

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Educational and (psycho-)linguistic research on L1 and L2 acquisition in bilingual children sketches them as a group of language learners varying in many aspects. However, most studies to date have based evaluations of language proficiency or new assessment tools on data from heritage children, while studies on the appropriateness of assessment tools for school-age refugee children remain a notable exception. This study focuses on the standardized assessment tool BUEGA for primary school children, which is, among others, a widespread tool for the assessment of pedagogical support or special needs (SN) in Germany. We compare the performance of 12 typically developing monolinguals (Mo-TD: 7;3–12;1), 14 heritage-bilinguals (BiTD: 7;1–13;4, L1 Turkish and Arabic), 12 refugee- students (BiTD: 8;7–13;1, L1 Arabic), and 7 children with developmental language disorders (DLD: 7;7–13;9) on the subtests of grammar, word-reading, and spelling. Overall results show that refugee-BiTDs perform in the (monolingual) pathology range. No significant differences emerged between students with DLD and typically developing (TD) refugee students. Considering the assessment of school-related language performance, bilingual refugees are at risk of misdiagnosis, along with the well-known effects of educational disadvantage. This particularly applies to children with low socioeconomic status (SES). Looking beyond oral language competencies and using test combinations can help exclude language disorders in school-age children with limited L2 proficiency.

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Section: Bilingualism and Dldmentioning

confidence: 99%