The Determinants of Immigrants’ Language Proficiency

In this presentation, I review the main theoretical and empirical insights from my previous and current work on the determinants of immigrants’ second-language proficiency. The language skills of immigrants are important to study, because language proficiency plays a pivotal role in the economic incorporation of immigrants and in establishing contacts with the native population. Furthermore, immigrant language proficiency has important consequences for the educational attainment of their children. I present key findings from my cross-national research on immigrants’ language proficiency, from a dynamic study of language acquisition in the United States, from a study among refugees in the Netherlands, and from current work on the language proficiency of immigrants in Belgium, a multilingual receiving context.