Language development of newly immigrated children and adolescents in Germany. New research cooperations for educational practice.
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The Ladenburg Roundtable “Language Development of Newly Immigrated School Pupils in Germany – Research Access and Cooperations” intends to contribute toward research into how the language development of migrant minors can be improved. An interdisciplinary group of scientists will meet at the conference in Ladenburg from October 24-25, 2024.
The number of migrants in Germany has strongly increased since 2015 – and even the number of foreign-born children and adolescents aged 5 to 18 who have migrated to this country amounts to 1.36 million. This corresponds to 13.3 percent of all school-age children in Germany. However, equal access to education is currently hindered by various factors: Newly immigrated children and adolescents have to wait an average of seven months to be allocated to a school. Once admitted, they learn German on the basis of very different models; and suitable curricula, learning materials, and trained teachers are mostly lacking. In addition, hardly any research is carried out into this group of pupils and their learning situations. In fact, only in exceptional cases do they receive targeted, empirically evaluated language support.
A transformation in the education system is thus urgently needed. However, adequate schooling for this heterogeneous target group is difficult to implement without empirically supported knowledge of the language education and academic development of young migrants. This situation could be alleviated by means of interdisciplinary cooperative studies that link several locations and thus provide a broader basis for access to the target group, the educational institutions, and the corresponding comparison group of German-born pupils.
Against this background, an interdisciplinary group of scientists will discuss possible forms of cooperation within the framework of the “Ladenburg Roundtable.” The aim is to initiate joint and coordinated research into the language development of newly immigrated pupils – and to sound out opportunities for improved educational practice.
- Prof. Dr. Nicole Marx, University of Cologne