National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), Focus on language proficiency of students with migration background (Pillar “Education Acquisition of Persons with Migration Background”)

The National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) has been set up to find out more about how education is acquired, to understand how it impacts on individual biographies, and to describe and analyze the major educational processes and trajectories across the life span. Another crucial issue is to find out which competencies are decisive for attaining educational certificates, which are decisive for lifelong learning, and which are decisive for a successful individual and social life.

Particular characteristics and contexts associated with an ethnic background or a migration biography (in particular, the language spoken in the family, relations to the country of origin, integration in ethnic communities and networks, religious orientation) exert a further influence on the acquisition of competencies and on education decisions, which goes beyond mechanisms of social inequality.

As a result, the NEPS has set up the special pillar “Education Acquisition of Persons with Migration Background” consisting of the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) and the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) alongside the Humboldt-University of Berlin to address the acquisition of education across the life span against a migration background. This will concentrate on assessing migration-specific characteristics that are relevant to education. One focus of the migration pillar will be to assess the proficiency of students in the language of their parents' country of origin, because characteristics of first- and second-language acquisition provide a major approach for explaining success in education and on the labor market.
The project based in Berlin as part of the pillar “Education Acquisition of Person with Migration Background” pursues the following goals:

? Development of testing procedures to measure immigrant students’ proficiency of their first language, i.e. the language of their parents' country of origin, in Russian and Turkish for grades 2, 6, 7, and 9
? Development of survey questions related to language proficiency of adolescents with migration background, e.g. self-assessed language proficiency, school-related and extracurricular language environments, participation at institutional language programs