The development of newly immigrated students’ receptive vocabulary size in German and English

• Applicant: Melanie Fuchs
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 538386871

The importance of vocabulary skills particularly for second language learners is well-known, and previous studies have shown that vocabulary skills correlate with other language skills such as reading comprehension (Lervåg and Aukrust, 2010). Being able to read in the language of instruction is a prerequisite for almost all subjects taught in school. For example, the ability of students who did not speak German at home to solve math word problems in German was influenced by their vocabulary skills in German (Paetsch and Kempert, 2022). In my project, I plan to investigate the receptive vocabulary size of newly immigrated students attending secondary schools in Germany. I plan to specifically focus on newly immigrated students who were allocated to a secondary school in Germany due to their age and who were not proficient in German when they started school in Germany. The few available studies that have focused on school-aged immigrants indicate that it is easier for children who arrive at a younger age to meet their age-appropriate norms than it is for older children (Paradis et al., 2020; Thordardottir and Juliusdottir, 2013), thus further highlighting the importance to investigate this specific group of second-language learners. The first goal is to investigate the difference between their receptive vocabulary size in German in comparison to that of their peers attending German schools since Grade 1. The second goal is to assess different factors (length of schooling in Germany, duration and intensity of German language support programs, German input and use outside of school lessons as well as age of arrival) that correlate with larger vocabulary sizes. In addition, I plan to investigate the receptive vocabulary size in the first foreign language taught at school (English) in order to assess how the vocabulary development in these two languages is correlated. On the one hand, there is evidence that the language proficiency in the language of instruction (German) is an important predictor for the language proficiency in the foreign language taught at school (Baumert et al., 2020). On the other hand, bilingual children acquiring German as a second language were shown to have advantages with regard to foreign language learning (Salomé et al., 2022). Therefore, it will be interesting to investigate the conditions under which bilingual children might have an advantage in foreign language learning. The receptive vocabulary size in both languages will be assessed using frequency-based vocabulary tests. The test is based on Nation’s (1983) Vocabulary Levels Test and consists of five frequency levels containing 30 target words each, which were taken from the 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000 and 5000 most frequent German and British English words. The test will be administered to 100 newly immigrated students and 100 of their peers at two different time points in order to be able to investigate the development.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position