Can language skills in Luxembourgish be a stepping stone to German? Evidence against the transfer assumption

In Luxembourg, children usually learn to write and read in German, a language, which most of them do not speak at home or learn in early childhood education settings. Many had assumed that the promotion of Luxembourgish would be enough to prepare (Kühn, 2008) the children for the German language; that Luxembourgish language skills could be transferred into German language skills. We examine the validity of this assumption by comparing the listening comprehension of first grade students in German and Luxembourgish between different home language groups. For this, we used quantitative data from the 2022 Épreuves Standardisées, the national monitoring programme (Hornung et al., 2023). While for children who only speak Luxembourgish at home, the German test seemed easier, bilingual children or children with other different home languages struggled more with German than with Luxembourgish listening comprehension – indicating that a (direct) transfer from one to the other language does not seem plausible for all children.