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Children of a first grade (symbolic photo)

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Christoph Soeder / dpa

The General Association of School Principals is calling for more mandatory language tests before school enrolment. "It must be ensured that children start school life with a sufficient vocabulary," said the association's chairwoman Gudrun Wolters-Vogeler of the "Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung" in an interview published on Sunday. If you don't bring it with you, "you have to buy it beforehand if possible".

Language lessons before the start of primary school

Wolters-Vogeler emphasized that this is the only way to achieve equal opportunities for children with a migration background. She cited Hamburg as a role model, where children are subjected to a mandatory language examination long before they start school. Therefore, if they lack German language skills, they could receive language lessons there even before they start primary school.

"The task of the schools is to make the children fit for the future and suitable for everyday life," said the association chairwoman. "But teachers can't do that if they don't understand the children and vice versa." If something is not done about this at an early stage, language problems would continue even in older children and adolescents. "How are you supposed to understand technical terms if you don't know the words around them in a text?" asked Wolters-Vogeler.

The fact that the language and reading skills of German primary school children are mediocre at best, even in an international comparison, was recently also shown by the worldwide reading study Igloo (International Primary School Reading Survey). In addition to the performance measurement tasks, the igloo test sheets also included some personal questions. One of them: Do you like to read? In Germany, only a good third (34 percent) of the children surveyed answered "yes". 22 percent even said they don't like reading at all. The IQB education trend, which was published last autumn, also gave Germany's primary school children – and thus also school policy – a bad report.

evh/AFP