Daller, H., & Grotjahn, R. (1999). The language proficiency of Turkish returnes from Germany: An emperical investigationn of academic and everyday language proficiency. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 12(2), 156–172. Bristol, UK: University of the West of England.

Population: Two sets of students: one comprised of Turkish students learning Philology in Germany, the other Turkish students who learned the same subject but did so in Turkey (without ever living in Germany).

Size: n=159. The control group (living only in Turkey) consisted of n=10.

Details: The Turkish migration to Germany started in the early 1960s. From the beginning, however, there was also a constant re-migration of Turks, including thousands of children, back to their home country. The participants in this survey were either born in Germany or had gone there at a very young age. The majority of these children acquired Turkish before learning German in school. Since Turkish was not supported, German was their language for academic purposes. Upon returning, at the average age of 13 (Daller, 1995), they continued their education in Turkish.

These students had two breaks in their language learning process: (1)Turkish was the main means of everyday communication while in Germany. (2) Upon return, Turkish became the most important school language. Their use of it switched from ELP to ALP. Special schools with a biligual program (Anadolu Schools) were opened to help re-acculturate these returnees. Tailored C-tests were used to assess both every-day and academic language proficiency.

Conclusions: There was a considerable difference between their knowlede of ELP and ALP, with ELP being much higher with returnees than with foreign language learners. However, once re-acculturated, a process of language attrition took place in the domain of ELP. A similar attrition may have taken place with ALP, but this never showed because of the returnees’ continued exposure to academic German in classrooms and at the University. As a result, while their ELP decreased, ALP was maintained or even increased. Overall, this means that for the returnees there is a shift towards a proficiency profile that is more typical of foreign language learners than bilinguals who learned German as a foreign language.

Comments: According to my family [still in Austria], similar ratios were noted in Austrian returnees from Canada. Their everyday language proficiency (ELP) in English was far superior to that of students who learned English only in their classroom. However, that ELP fluency waned through attrition; likewise, academically, they had no better grades than those who never left.