This symposium presents research on developmental patterns of children with an immigration background during preschool, Kindergarten, and elementary school from Germany, Australia, and Canada. The symposium addresses research questions that are critical for increasingly multicultural societies, in which a large percentage of the population has an immigrant and foreign language background. In Germany, Australia, and Canada, about one third of young children have an immigrant background. Therefore, schools and communities are often confronted with communication challenges, especially in neighborhoods in which most or even all children have an immigrant and foreign language background. Previous research has found that children’s communication and language competences are critical for their development, academically and socially. Therefore, an important aspect of supporting immigrant families and their children is to foster their communication and language skills. In order to inform practices and policies in this regard, differentiated research knowledge on the development of children with an immigrant background and on the effectiveness of programs that aim to foster their competences are needed. The four papers in this symposium address different aspects of this area of research. The first study from Canada analyses population-level data on Kindergarten children, to find out whether the developmental outcomes in the physical, social, emotional, cognitive, and communication domains differ systematically between children with no immigration background, children with immigration background and little knowledge of the language of instruction (that is, English), and children with immigration background who have good English skills. The second study from Canada compares non-immigrant children with Punjabi-speaking and Cantonese-speaking immigrant children with respect to their developmental outcomes in Kindergarten and academic achievement in Grade 4, and explores whether the developmental patterns are moderated by children’s gender and their families’ socioeconomic status. The longitudinal study from Germany followed four cohorts of young children with a migrant background, to examine which factors (for example, entrance age into childcare; child-educator interactions in childcare; families’ social interactions in the community) during the preschool years promote language acquisition. The study from Australia conducted focus groups to examine the validity of the Australian Early Development Index (AEDI), a teacher-administered measure to assess Kindergarten/preschool children’s developmental outcomes in the physical, social, emotional, cognitive, and communication domain, with respect to children with a Language-Background-Other-Than-English (LBOTE). The objective of the symposium is to motivate discussions, raise differentiated questions, and inform and stimulate further research on the topic of immigrant children’s developmental trajectories.

The symposium combines studies that used quantitative, descriptive, and qualitative methods. The population-level study from Canada, drawing from Kindergarten teacher ratings of children’s developmental outcomes (n > 100,000), conducted group comparisons between non-immigrant and immigrant groups via regression and ANOVA techniques. The second study from Canada employed a multilevel analysis to examine the relationship between children’s developmental outcomes in Kindergarten and Grade 4 (n = 28,600) and children’s immigrant and first language background, gender, and socioeconomic status. The study from Germany used a longitudinal design, following 492 children for two years, starting at age 3. In the multi-level analysis, children’s language competences, assessed with a standardized measure, were predicted by family context variables and childcare characteristics. The Australian study conducted 8 focus groups (n = 84) to explore the cultural adequacy of the Australian Early Development Index (AEDI) for children with a Language-Background-Other-Than-English (LBOTE).

The two Canadian studies find that immigrant children with adequate English communication skills in Kindergarten also do very well in the physical, social, cognitive, and emotional domain, and in Grade 4 academic achievement. Among some immigrant groups, children with inadequate communication skills in Kindergarten have the lowest developmental outcomes in most developmental domains, and these differences persist until Grade 4. The longitudinal study from Germany shows that social interactions between immigrant children and childcare educators, and with non-immigrant families in the community are most positively associated with German language acquisition. The Australian study suggests that the AEDI in its current form does not adequately capture the cultural domain of immigrant children’s development. The studies illustrate that research findings cannot be generalized across ‘immigrant children’—rather, developmental patterns are context, immigrant background, and age dependent, suggesting that future research in this area needs to be culturally embedded within a given community context.