Effects of mathematics items' language demands for language minority students: Do they differ between grades?

•We examined the effects of math items' language demands for language minority students.•We compared these effects for third and fourth graders in Germany.•Language demands affect third graders more strongly than fourth graders.•Within grades, language demands do not disadvantage language minority students.

This study investigates the connection between the academic language demands of mathematics test items and the test performance of monolingual students and language minority students for 2796 third and 26,016 fourth grade students in Germany. We analyzed students' responses to the 126 mathematics test items used in both grades using a generalized linear mixed model and included students' socioeconomic status as a covariate. The results indicate that language minority students are not significantly disadvantaged by items with high academic language demands compared to German monolingual students in the same grade. However, language minority students as well as German monolingual students are more strongly affected by items with high academic language demands in third grade than in fourth grade. Thus, the impact of academic language demands seems to depend on grade level rather than on language minority student status.