Linguistic diversity in the classroom, student achievement, and social integration

Julia Bredtmann, Sebastian Otten and Christina Vonnahme

No 783, Ruhr Economic Papers from RWI - Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-University Bochum, TU Dortmund University, University of Duisburg-Essen

Abstract: In this article, we analyze whether non-native speakers in the classroom affect the educational achievement and social integration of migrant and native students. In contrast to previous studies, which mainly examine the effect of the share of immigrant pupils, we focus on language heterogeneity by using a novel measure of the degree of linguistic diversity in the classroom. Our analysis is based on a comprehensive survey of 4th-grade students in German primary schools, which contains detailed information on students' language and math scores, their social integration, as well as on sociodemographic and school characteristics. We find a negative association between the share of non-native speakers in the classroom and students' test scores and their social integration in the class. Conditional on the immigrant concentration in the class, the degree of linguistic diversity has no adverse effect on students' language and math skills, but worsens the social integration of immigrant students. We demonstrate the robustness of these findings in a variety of robustness checks.

Keywords: linguistic diversity; educational performance; social integration; migrant peer effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I24 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mig and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/193698/1/1067388079.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Linguistic diversity in the classroom, student achievement, and social integration (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:rwirep:783

DOI: 10.4419/86788911

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Ruhr Economic Papers from RWI - Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-University Bochum, TU Dortmund University, University of Duisburg-Essen Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().