Language Culture and Curriculum
Editor and Book Reviews Editor: Eoghan Mac Aogain (St Patrick's College)
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Volume: 12 Number: 2 Page: 156–172
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The Language Proficiency of Turkish Returnees from Germany: An Empirical Investigation of Academic and Everyday Language Proficiency
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Helmut Daller
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This study analyses the everyday and academic language proficiency of German-Turkish bilinguals who grew up in Germany as children of Turkish immigrants and learned German as a second language. They attended
German schools before returning to Turkey, where German formed part of the school curriculum. The bilinguals of our sample were all univeristy students of German philology. Although the returnees' command
of German seemed to be native-like at a surface level, their teachers and lecturers frequently complained about their academic language proficiency. Therefore, their everyday and their academic language
proficiency was measured with two different C-tests, developed on the basis of Cummins' distinction between basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS) and cognitive-academic language proficiency (CALP).
The scores obtained were compared with those of a control group of Turkish university students who had spent their childhood in Turkey and learned German at school. Statistical analysis of the data yielded
the following results: (1) the C-tests were a useful means of measuring different aspects of language proficiency; (2) the returnees showed significantly higher scores for everyday language proficiency in
German compared to the control group; (3) the main predictor variables were school type and length of time spent at a German school; and (4) attrition of everyday language proficiency in German depended
on the length of time since return to Turkey.
© Multilingual Matters 1999
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