Bilinguales Lernen in der Grundschule: Einblicke in sprachliche und naturwissenschaftliche Kompetenzen

There is a growing interest in bilingual teaching programmes in primary schools especially because they open up the opportunity to increase the contact time with the English language. Yet, the question to what extent it is possible to teach content matter in English to beginning foreign language learners on the same level of complexity as in German has largely been ignored. This paper presents the results of the BiLL-NaWi study, which investigates the outcomes of bilingual Science teaching of fourth graders in North Rhine-Westphalia in comparison to learners who were taught in German (N = 332) The analyses show that students in bilingual programmes achieve considerably higher scores on English C-tests and German Science tests (taken from Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)) than their peers in non-bilingual strands at the same schools; on average, they also score slightly above German TIMSS students. However, matching students from TIMSS and the BiLL-NaWi study on key variables nullifies the advantages of the bilingual group while confirming the below-average performance of the non-bilingual groups.