Reports on three investigations concerning the acquisition of a third language in bilingual immigrant students in Germany and Sweden. The results suggest that immigrant students who always use Swedish at home but have passive knowledge of their first language clearly perform better in English than do Swedish monolingual students. (SL)

To find out which context variables relate to improvement in the second-language acquisition of migrant children in West Germany, a longitudinal study with a follow-up design with Turkish elementary school students was set up. The study was carried out using standardized tests and by conducting interviews with the pupils, their parents and…

With its focus on simplification universals, developmental orders, teachability, and functional-grammatical bases for acquisition, the well-known research on German (L2) language acquisition has contributed much to SLA research in general. At the same time, sociolinguistic investigations focus squarely on the difficult social conditions that…