Discussion Paper Series - CDP 30/21 - Socioemotional Skills and Refugees’ Language Acquisition

Exposure refers to the appropriate learning environment with the two dimensions of time units of exposure to the language and exposure’s intensity per unit of time (Chiswick and Miller 2001). [...] 3.1 LINKING SOCIOEMOTIONAL SKILLS WITH DESTINATION-LANGUAGE ACQUISITION We assume that socioemotional skills affect second language acquisition through the mechanisms of exposure, efficiency and incentives and ultimately help to explain the speed and quality of an immigrant’s language acquisition. [...] 4 DATA AND METHOD 11 4.1 THE IAB-BAMF-SOEP SAMPLE OF REFUGEES IN GERMANY The empirical analysis is based on the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Sample of Refugees (Brücker, Rother, and Schupp 2017), a large-scale longitudinal survey of refugees and their household members in Germany. [...] We additionally control for the respondent’s gender, whether children under the age of 16 live in the household, the country of origin and the sample to which the respondent belongs. [...] The analyses of the three components of language proficiency – speaking, reading, and writing – showed that certain skills are better suited for the acquisition of specific language components; for example, extroversion and speaking proficiency.