Resumen de Social context and the acquisition of german by Turkish migrant children
The relationship between the living conditions for foreign workers’ children in Germany and their acquisition of German as a second language have hardly been studied. The results of a longitudinal study with a follow‐up design are presented, which was carried out with Turkish and German elementary school children using standardised tests and conducting interviews with the pupils, their teachers, parents and siblings. Out of 20 social context variables under investigation, seven correlated significantly with the progress the migrant children made in their overall second language proficiency, the most outstanding being their contact with their German peers in and outside school. Further relationships were found between the children's improvement in German and the duration of their attendance at German educational institutions, the amount of time they watched German television programmes, the schooling and vocational training of their parents, parents’ contact with Germans and the amount of German read in the family. Improvement in the receptive, productive and lexical‐semantic linguistic abilities additionally correlated with the children's attitudes towards living in Germany, their contact with German adults and their siblings’ contact with German people and proficiency in German as a second language. The results provide information for deducing eductional measures to help foreign children learn the majority language more efficiently.
