Everyday and academic language comprehension: Investigating their relationships with school success and challenges for language minority learners

• We investigate everyday (EL) and academic language comprehension (AL).
• AL is more strongly correlated with math achievement than is EL.
• All students struggle more with AL than with EL.
• Students with Turkish language background also struggle with EL.
• Language-specific group differences disappear when controlling for SES.

The present study addresses two core assumptions on the concept of academic language. We investigated first, whether academic language comprehension is more closely related to academic achievement than everyday language comprehension and second, whether language minority learners are particularly disadvantaged in the comprehension of academic language. Based on data from a nation-wide reading comprehension assessment conducted in German elementary schools in grade 4 (N = 22,015), we found that comprehending academic language was more highly correlated with mathematical achievement than comprehending everyday language. While students with a Turkish language background were disadvantaged in their comprehension of both everyday and academic language, students with other home languages only lagged behind their monolingual German peers in their academic language comprehension. After controlling for sociocultural resources, group-specific performance differences in comprehending both everyday and academic language disappeared.