Language assessment tools for Arabic-speaking heritage and refugee children in Germany

Abstract

Though Germany has long provided education for children speaking a heritage language and received two recent waves of refugees, reliable assessment tools for diagnosis of language impairment or the progress in the acquisition of German as a second language (L2) by refugee children are still lacking. The few tools expressly targeting bilingual populations are normed for younger, early successive bilingual children. This study investigates 27 typically developing children with Arabic as first language (L1), comparing 15 school-age Syrian refugees (6;6–12;8), with 12 heritage speakers (6;0–12;9). We assess the L1 and L2 skills of these two groups with standardized tests, but crucially with an Arabic and a German sentence repetition (SRT) as well as a nonword (NWRT) repetition task (Grimm & Hübner, in press; Marinis & Armon-Lotem, 2015). Comparable scores emerged only for German LITMUS-NWRT and Arabic LITMUS-SRT. Refugee children had an advantage in L1 measures, for example, vocabulary and morphosyntactic production, whereas they performed poorly in the German LITMUS-SRT and other L2 tests involving morphosyntax and vocabulary even with 24 months of systematic exposure. This indicates that the acquisition of adequate vocabulary and complex syntax takes time. The paper explores factors influencing performance on the repetition tasks and relates the results to established diagnostic procedures and educational policies.

The role of socioemotional wellbeing difficulties and adversity in the L2 acquisition of first-generation refugee children

“…Existing studies with Arabic L1 -English/German L2 refugee children show findings broadly in line with what is described above for length of L2 exposure, richness of the L2 environment and L2 use at home (Hamann et al, 2020;Paradis et al, 2020;Soto-Corominas et al, 2021). Because length of L2 exposure is the most robust and well researched predictor across studies with different bilingual populations and linguistic subdomains, this constituted the input factor in the present study.…”

“…Three studies have examined the bilingual development of Arabic L1 – German L2 and Arabic L1–English L2 refugee children in Germany (Hamann, Chilla, Abed Ibrahim & Fekete, 2020) and Canada (Paradis, Soto-Corominas, Chen & Gottardo, 2020; Soto-Corominas, Daskalaki, Paradis, Winters-Difani & Al Janaideh, 2021). In Hamann et al (2020) and Paradis et al (2020), moderate and positive correlations between AOA and L2 outcomes were present in the samples for each study; however, AOA did not emerge as a significant predictor in regression models of German L2 syntax, and English L2 vocabulary and morphology, respectively, in spite of there being a wide range of AOAs in the samples. In contrast, Soto-Corominas et al (2021) did find older AOA to be a significant predictor of stronger syntactic abilities in English L2 syntax.…”

Sentence Repetition Tasks to Detect and Prevent Language Difficulties: A Scoping Review

“…In these cases, English tends to be one of the participants’ languages. In fact, only 20% of the studies that included bilingual participants compared languages other than English (e.g., Arabic-German [ 17 ]; Russian-German [ 44 ]; and Spanish-Catalan [ 45 ]). In our view, it is critical that new studies with bilingual and multilingual children incorporate participants with different languages.…”

“…These kinds of tasks should be developed in different languages, according to their linguistic characteristics and particularities, and can be used afterwards with different populations. A number of studies with monolingual children who speak languages other than English, and with bi/multilingual participants with typical and non-typical language development have been carried out in recent years (see [ 13 ] for Hebrew-Russian; [ 14 ] for (European) Spanish; [ 15 ] for Welsh-English; [ 16 ] for Catalan; [ 17 ] for Arabic-German; [ 18 ] for Hungarian; [ 19 ] for Vietnamese; [ 20 ] for Czech; [ 21 ] for Cantonese; [ 22 ] for (Latino) Spanish-English; and [ 23 ] for Danish). However, drawing on the review in [ 13 ], until relatively recently, little work had focused on diagnostic accuracy of repetition tasks (SRTs and non-word repetition) in bilinguals with SLI that speak languages other than English.…”

Interdependence between L1 and L2: The case of Syrian children with refugee backgrounds in Canada and the Netherlands

“…Few studies have investigated the language development of refugee children, even though the bilingual development in this group of children raises concerns (Kaplan et al, 2016). Accordingly, in this study, we employed different adaptations of the Litmus Sentence Repetition Tasks (Litmus-SRTs) in order to tap into L1 and L2 syntactic knowledge of children who are Syrian refugees (see for a similar approach Hamann et al (2020)). We did so with two main objectives in mind: (1) to investigate risk factors for refugee children's L2 abilities, with a particular focus on the role of L1 abilities and the interaction between L1 abilities and length of L2 exposure and (2) to compare patterns across two different national contexts, Canada and the Netherlands.…”