The Role of Academic‐Language Features for Reading Comprehension of Language‐Minority Students and Students From Low‐SES Families

摘要: Academic language is frequently assumed to be especially challenging for students from families of low socioeconomic status (SES) and even more so language-minority students. Due their often disadvantaged position regarding background exposure the instruction, minority are considered suffer a double disadvantage when processing complex academic language. To test this assumption, present study investigated relationships between various features differential item functioning (DIF) in reading comprehension on one hand German monolingual low-SES other hand. The analyses based data 19,108 fourth-grade who took part National Assessment Study elementary school. Our findings indicate that both lexical grammatical correlate with DIF disfavoring students, pronounced effects long words average sentence length. For families, fewer were associated DIF, correlations generally smaller than Findings discussed relation