{"title":"Language lesson learned—foreign-origin teachers and their effect on students’ language skills","authors":"Lisa Sofie Höckel","doi":"10.1007/s00148-024-01019-6","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>International migration increases classroom diversity around the world, but little is known about the effect of foreign-origin teachers on students’ academic achievement. This study investigates whether foreign-origin teachers causally affect their students’ academic performance. Exploiting within-student variation in assignment to teachers in Germany, I find that teachers who are immigrants or descendants of immigrants significantly increase the reading comprehension of their students in secondary school, but do not affect their math skills. This study is the first to investigate bilingualism as a potential mechanism and shows that the effect on reading comprehension is driven by bilingual foreign-origin teachers. Given their own experience in language learning, they seem exceptionally well-equipped to teach languages. This study contributes to the scant evidence on the causal relationship between teachers’ foreign origin and students’ academic achievement in light of a large and persistent achievement gap between native and foreign-origin students.</p>","PeriodicalId":48013,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Population Economics","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.1000,"publicationDate":"2024-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Population Economics","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-024-01019-6","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
International migration increases classroom diversity around the world, but little is known about the effect of foreign-origin teachers on students’ academic achievement. This study investigates whether foreign-origin teachers causally affect their students’ academic performance. Exploiting within-student variation in assignment to teachers in Germany, I find that teachers who are immigrants or descendants of immigrants significantly increase the reading comprehension of their students in secondary school, but do not affect their math skills. This study is the first to investigate bilingualism as a potential mechanism and shows that the effect on reading comprehension is driven by bilingual foreign-origin teachers. Given their own experience in language learning, they seem exceptionally well-equipped to teach languages. This study contributes to the scant evidence on the causal relationship between teachers’ foreign origin and students’ academic achievement in light of a large and persistent achievement gap between native and foreign-origin students.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Population Economics is an international quarterly that publishes original theoretical and applied research in all areas of population economics.
Micro-level topics examine individual, household or family behavior, including household formation, marriage, divorce, fertility choices, education, labor supply, migration, health, risky behavior and aging. Macro-level investigations may address such issues as economic growth with exogenous or endogenous population evolution, population policy, savings and pensions, social security, housing, and health care.
The journal also features research into economic approaches to human biology, the relationship between population dynamics and public choice, and the impact of population on the distribution of income and wealth. Lastly, readers will find papers dealing with policy issues and development problems that are relevant to population issues.The journal is published in collaboration with POP at UNU-MERIT, the Global Labor Organization (GLO) and the European Society for Population Economics (ESPE).Officially cited as: J Popul Econ Factor (RePEc): 13.576 (July 2018) Rank 69 of 2102 journals listed in RePEc