Moving beyond binary language status in research: Investigating early foreign language learning and linguistic distance

Globalization and migration continue to shape our societies, including educational contexts such as school classrooms. In response to young learners’ linguistic needs, particularly in the context of foreign language learning in Germany, educational approaches need to be adapted to meet the needs of multilingual students. Current, binary approaches accounting for diverse linguistic backgrounds of students in research assume a high degree of homogeneity among multilingual students. Linguistic distance measures may provide alternative, more fine-grained, continuous tools to account for linguistic diversity. This study employs lexical linguistic distance to account for young language learners’ linguistic diversity in a reanalysis of Jaekel et al. (2017). Additionally, mixed-effects modeling was employed to factor in within-class effects for within-class factors versus structural equation modeling, which was previously used. The results outline that linguistic distance provides additional information beyond binary language status. Mixed effects modeling renders comparable results with the same tendencies, but yields more nuanced perspectives on the data.