There is a general consensus that good language skills are a key competence and one of the most important prerequisites for success at school, a career and, and lastly, societal success. However, there is no scientific consensus on which language skills in which developmental phases are most significant for the acquisition of further skills in other areas, such as learning success in various school subjects, nor on the best ways to diagnose and promote them.

Good language skills are not only essential for German and foreign language lessons but are a prerequisite in all subjects. As the PISA studies have shown, a high level of reading competence cannot be taken for granted. Around 20% of the 15-year-olds examined in Germany do not fulfil the requirements (Weis et al. 2018: 61). This means that the proportion of low-achieving pupils is relatively high. In particular, sense-extracting reading (reading comprehension) is poorly developed. Oral language skills play a role here insofar as children can only understand in reading what they also understand in listening. Good oral language skills are therefore an important prerequisite for the development of reading skills. In addition, a large part of the teaching of learning content in the classroom takes place orally, albeit using the language registers of educational and specialised language. These present high acquisition hurdles, especially for language-poor pupils, but also for pupils who are learning German as a second language.

There are therefore clear challenges from an educational perspective that require a closer look at the relationships between language acquisition, reading and writing skills, school success and various factors (such as multilingualism, social background, special educational needs). This research must be organised on an interdisciplinary basis, because although individual disciplines can address partial aspects of these challenges (such as factors for successful language acquisition, the influence of multilingualism on language acquisition, which linguistic phenomena are complex and why, how certain linguistic aspects develop), only jointly planned and conducted research can lead to a better understanding of such complex connections. This is why this research group is interdisciplinary: Researchers from the fields of linguistics, language didactics and special needs education cooperate on this research endeavour.

We would like to ask other interested researchers to contact Esther Ruigendijk, the group's spokesperson.