Fairer school start in Luxembourg: First findings of the pilot project „Zesumme Wuessen!“ offering literacy acquisition in German or French.

The luxemburgish educational system has to deal with a growing number of students that don’t speak the school language at home (LUCET & SCRIPT, 2023). These students were repeatedly identified as being at risk of struggling academically, which might be related to the challenging language curriculum (e.g., Hornung et al., 2021). The aim of the literacy pilot project “ ALPHA - Zesumme Wuessen!” is to adress these inequalities by giving parents the opportunity to choose between German or French literacy acquisition at the beginning of primary school (Cycle 2.1).
Using full-cohort data from the Luxembourg School Monitoring Program (ÉpStan), the pilot project was evaluated by assessing C2.1 students’ achievement and collecting self-reported data on academic motivation and parental support (Colling et al., 2024).
Regarding the composition of the student population, students of the pilot project differ from their peers following the regular curriculum at national level (N=5824) (e.g., SES, language background). To ensure a better comparability, propensity score matching was used to create reference groups (consisting of students with similar background characteristics) for both the ALPHA-French (N = 48) and ALPHA-German (N = 68) group.
Whereas most students showed solid basic skills in mathematics and Luxembourgish listening comprehension; our results offer a first indication that the pilot project might contribute to reducing educational inequalities: (1) The ALPHA-French students performed better in both tests assessing their language of literacy acquisition compared to their reference group (N = 240), (2) they furthermore expressed a higher domain-specific academic motivation in French (i.e., reading) and (3) their parents perceived themselves more able to support their child academically due to their own language skills in French compared to parents of students from the reference group.
These findings will be discussed considering methodological limitations (e.g., sample size, test design) before presenting potential explanations and giving an outlook on future research.