Germany: Reading skills below European average, and dropping – DW

35 comments
  1. > “We have more children in schools who do not speak German at home any more. For elementary schools this is not a new challenge, but it is a growing one,” McElvany said.

    Other countries with larger migrant populations and a growing trend towards multilingual cultures, like the Netherlands and Belgium, show comparable downward trends and, like Germany, larger-than-average discrepancies between the best- and worst-performing kids.

  2. There should be a study that differentiates between native German speakers and others. Because of the large influx of immigrants who don’t speak the language it is hard to tell if the quality of teaching has gone down or if other factors are the cause for that.

  3. It’s almost as if immigration cannot fully compensate the decline in domestic birthrates, especially if the immigrants aren’t very well educated.

  4. Maybe I’m being the devil’s advocate here but should you not expect a lower level of literacy in general if the language itself is more difficult than say, Spanish or English?

  5. Thats what happens when you allow to form ghettos and whole districts inhabitet by imigrants of one nationality.

    Theres no need or will to learn countrys lenguage for kids in places like that. It will harm those kids future possibilites and everybody looses in the end.

  6. Not surprising. I went to the highest school form and my cousin to the lowest. We had like 10-15 % people who don’t have German as their native language at home, for him it was more like 10 % native speakers. Now parents of none native speakers are unable to help their children for many things and we need to create mechanisms that these people have the same opportunities independently of what their parents speak at home

  7. Germany has similar immigration numbers than other European countries. What is different there?

    I know that in Spain many immigrants come from Spanish speaking countries (like Mexico or Argentina) so to learn the local variant is a very low barrier of entry to education. In fact it is lower than from other EU countries. Even that any Latin-language makes it easier (Portuguese, French, Italian…). Is this the reason? Or are there more differences?

  8. Elementary school in germany is a joke, atleast was on my time 1999-2004ish. Why do i need to lern sewing in school or what trees are named. They should more focus on german and math

  9. The schools in Germany are shit. That’s the reason. Don’t blame the kids. Headline should be: German schools teach below average

  10. Well, that’s because they are trying to read German and everyone knows German is a really difficult language.

  11. Europe, get your birthrates up, you have the money to do it… Don’t rely on mass immigration

  12. Maybe because teachers are biased and tend to send immigrant children to hauptschule and parents just don’t know better.

  13. its also way more common for children in first grade to know the german version of “son of a bitch” nowadays, the importance of language has shifted quite in the wrong direction…

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