Development of Majority Language Skills in Children with Different Family Language Backgrounds: Results from the BiKS-3-18 Study

Abstract

AbstractGiven that social disparities evolve early in development (cf. Weinert and Ebert this volume), the main aim of this chapter is to learn more about how disparities in (majority) language skills develop in preschool children when their parents have a nonnative German language background. For this purpose, we refer to key findings from the longitudinal study BiKS-3-18. These demonstrate that especially children with two nonnative German-speaking parents are disadvantaged in majority language development, particularly when the everyday language in the family is not German or when the family feels less integrated into German society. However, these two factors correlate only marginally, and both change over the preschool years. Moreover, our results suggest that the quality, and not the pure quantity, of German language interaction within the family promotes children’s majority language development. Further, results show that internal factors such as verbal working memory are an important explanatory factor for children’s language development in the majority language when children grow up with more than one language. Concerning external factors in the environment, the study can hardly demonstrate the effect of language and literacy support in preschool for children’s majority language development. We discuss how the results of the BiKS-3-18 study can (and cannot) contribute to an understanding of the complex developmental process of majority language development in preschool children.