Birgit Heppt

Inclusive Literacy Education and Reading Assessment for Language-Minority Students and Students with Special Educational Needs in German Elementary Schools

Abstract Large-Scale Assessments in Germany have shown that language-minority students as well as students with special educational needs (SEN) perform significantly less well than language-majority students or students without SEN. This performance gap may be related to a limited accessibility of the tests. One way to test whether assessments allow all students to demonstrate their knowledge in a comparable way is the analysis of differential item functioning (DIF). In this chapter, we evaluate DIF coefficients in order to examine group-specific difficulties in reading comprehension for language-minority students and students with SEN in the German National Educational Assessment. In the first study, we investigate the assessment of reading literacy of language-minority learners and German monolinguals from low-SES families. We found only a few items with moderate DIF and no items with large DIF. This indicates that the reading assessment was equally valid for second-language learners and German monolingual students. In our second study, we report about the psychometrically successful development of easy and more accessible reading tasks for students with SEN. Further analyses showed that DIF predominantly occurred in items that captured contents that are not necessarily covered in literacy instruction targeted at students with SEN.

Listening comprehension of academic and everyday language in first language and second language students

Listening comprehension in academic contexts is an important prerequisite for the acquisition of school-related skills. However, the concept of academic language is generally the subject of much debate, and there is no consensus yet on what constitutes academic listening comprehension. To date, it remains unclear whether listening comprehension of academic language may be regarded as a distinct construct. The present study investigates the distinction of academic and everyday listening comprehension in 459 ninth-grade students speaking German as a first language or as a second language. Empirical results provide preliminary evidence that academic listening forms a separate facet of listening comprehension. Contrary to theoretical assumptions, second language students were not particularly disadvantaged in terms of academic listening comprehension.

Entwicklung und Erfassung bildungssprachlicher Merkmale: Forschungserkenntnisse und Perspektiven

Bildungssprache wird haufig als Schlussel fur Schulerfolg identifiziert (vgl. Gogolin/Lange 2011). Die hier zugrundeliegende Annahme ist, dass es ein bestimmtes Sprachniveau gibt, dessen Anspruch und Verwendung speziell mit dem Kontext Bildung zusammenhangt (vgl. Gogolin et al. 2013). Somit ist auch die Annahme naheliegend, dass dieses Sprachniveau in der kindlichen Entwicklung mit Eintritt in die Bildungsinstitutionen an Bedeutung gewinnt. Bislang liegen jedoch keine Resultate zu Zusammenhangen zwischen Bildungssprache und der sprachlich-kognitiven Entwicklung von Kindern vor. Das liegt auch daran, dass spezifische Instrumente zur Erfassung bildungssprachlicher Merkmale im Vorschul- und fruhen Schulalter noch fehlen. Erste Forschungsansatze und -erkenntnisse dazu werden in diesem Beitrag – der sich aus verschiedenen Vortragen eines Symposiums der Tagung entwickelt hat – vorgestellt.