Everyday and academic language comprehension: Investigating their relationships with school success and challenges for language minority learners

Abstract

The present study addresses two core assumptions on the concept of academic language. We investigated first, whether academic language comprehension is more closely related to academic achievement than everyday language comprehension and second, whether language minority learners are particularly disadvantaged in the comprehension of academic language. Based on data from a nation-wide reading comprehension assessment conducted in German elementary schools in grade 4 (N=22,015), we found that comprehending academic language was more highly correlated with mathematical achievement than comprehending everyday language. While students with a Turkish language background were disadvantaged in their comprehension of both everyday and academic language, students with other home languages only lagged behind their monolingual German peers in their academic language comprehension. After controlling for sociocultural resources, group-specific performance differences in comprehending both everyday and academic language disappeared.