The relationship between children’s vocabulary knowledge and reading in a multilingual education setting

In the multilingual Luxembourgish public school system, Luxembourgish is the main language of instruction in kindergarten, switching to German in Grade 1, and as of Grade 3 gradually introducing French. Additionally, Luxembourg hosts a multi-cultural population representing 170 different nationalities, and, correspondingly, a variety of languages spoken across the country (The Government of the Grand Dutchy of Luxembourg, 2023). Therefore, many children attending Luxembourgish public primary schools do not speak one of the three languages of instruction at home. Research has shown that children’s language background has a significant impact on their scholastic performance. More specifically, children who do not speak German or Luxembourgish at home score significantly lower in the German reading comprehension tests of the Luxembourg school monitoring programme “Épreuves Standardisées” in Grade 3 (Hoffmann et al., 2018). In this regard, to reliably diagnose a learning disorder in this multilingual context, it is important to distinguish difficulties resulting from lower (German) language proficiency from those resulting from an underlying (reading) disorder (Ugen et al., 2021).

In the current paper, we will present data of N~750 children aged 7-10 years. This data was collected as part of a project concerning the development of a test battery to diagnose specific learning disorders in a multilingual context (Romanovska et al., 2022). We will first present data on students´ performance on the reading tasks, distinguishing between different student groups based on the language spoken at home. Next, we will focus on the association between assessed German vocabulary knowledge and reading performance. Results will be discussed in relation to Luxembourg’s multilingual context and the implications of the interrelation of vocabulary knowledge and reading for diagnosing potential learning disorders.

References:

Hoffmann, D., Hornung, C., Gamo, S., Esch, P., Keller, U., & Fischbach, A. (2018). Schulische Kompetenzen von Erstklässlern und ihre Entwicklung nach zwei Jahren. In LUCET & SCRIPT (Eds.), Nationaler Bildungsbericht 2018 (pp. 84–96). University of Luxembourg.
Romanovska, L., Pit Ten-Cate, I., & Ugen, S. (2022, November 10). Development of a test battery to diagnose specific learning disorder in reading in a multilingual education context. Paper presented at the LuxERA conference 2022, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg.
The Government of the Grand Dutchy of Luxembourg. (2023, January). Society and culture – Population Demographics. https://luxembourg.public.lu/en/society-and-culture/population/demographics.html
Ugen, S., Schiltz, C., Fischbach, A., & Pit-ten Cate, I. M. (2021). Lernstörungen im multilingualen Kontext. Diagnose und Hilfestellungen. Melusina Press.