Immigrant children in mainstream classrooms in Greece: assessing their language proficiency

This study addresses immigrant students' language proficiency in order to: (a) classify students into proficiency levels, and (b) define the characteristics for each level of proficiency, including communicative skills and grammatical phe­nomena. To assess students' written proficiency, three tests of increasing diffi­culty were administered to approximately 500 students in the past year (1998-1999). To assess students' oral proficiency, oral proficiency interviews were conducted to a subsample of students to verify that their oral/aural proficiency coincides with their reading and writing skills. Results indicate that most stu­dents are Novice (48%) or Intermediate (42%) learners, while only few have reached the necessary proficiency levels, Advanced (9%) and Superior (1%), to be able to follow mainstream classroom instruction. The results of this study will be valuable as a model to identify the educational needs of immigrant children populations more broadly, and to make suggestions for the development of ap­propriate materials and assessment tools