A FRAMEWORK OF LANGUAGE COMPETENCES ACROSS THE CURRICULUM: LANGUAGE(S) IN AND FOR INCLUSIVE EDUCATION IN NORTHRHINE-WESTFALIA (GERMANY) EIKE THÜRMANN, HELMUT VOLLMER Despite serious efforts on the side of German school authorities, educational opportunities for students from a migrant background have not significantly improved over the years. Although the recently published 8 th integration report by the German government 1 shows some encouraging results, the situation of immigrant students remains critical in the field of education. On the one hand, immigrant students are slowly catching up when it comes to school graduation. More children from families with a migrant background achieve higher school leaving qualifications. On the other hand, 43 percent of migrants are leaving school with lower qualifications compared to 31 percent of students with an ethnic Ger- man background. More devastating is the fact that in 2008, 13.3 percent of immigrants between the ages of 15 and 19 dropped out of school without graduating - a dropout rate twice as high as that of students with an ethnic German background. And the number of migrants dropping out of school has risen: In 2007, it was only 10 percent. 1. Performance gaps between immigrant and non-immigrant students According to the “Progress in International Reading Study” (PIRLS) 2 , in Germany per- formance gaps between immigrant and non-immigrant students are already apparent at the primary level of formal education. In the course of lower-secondary education this per- formance gap widens across the curriculum. In mathematics, for example, Germany scored the largest disparity among educational systems participating in PISA 2003 – with one and a half proficiency levels. Petra Stanat and Gayle Christensen (2006: 32) com- ment: “This is particularly disconcerting, as these students have spent their entire school career in Germany.” In other words, Germany is among the few OECD countries in which the second-generation students from a migrant background perform at a significantly lower level (in mathematics, science, reading) than their first-generation peers. The situa- tion is particularly challenging at the lower end of the performance scale. Low-performing immigrant students often do substantially worse than low-performing native students, which makes the former extremely vulnerable to exclusion. 20 percent of second- generation students are found to be below level 1 on proficiency scales (= PISA) for mathematics and reading. Stanat & Christensen (2006: 54) rightly analyse: “They can be considered at serious risk of not having the reading and mathematics literacy skills neces- sary to help them tackle real-life situations, to continue learning and to enter successfully into the work force.” 1 Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Migration, Flüchtlinge und Integration (Juni 2010). 2 The German side of the PIRLS-project is called IGLU, cf. for results see Bos et al. 2003.