Immigrants change the school environment. A focus has been on negative spillovers on native students' educational attainment. Yet, exposure to immigrant peers has the potential for a wider range of effects. This paper examines effects on foreign language acquisition focusing on Norway. In Norway all students are taught, and are assessed, in English from an early age. We demonstrate that exposure to native English-speaking peers increase Norwegian students' English language skills. We provide evidence that these spillover effects likely occur outside of the classroom. They are solely present for English language skills and provide evidence of positive spillovers from immigrant diversity in schools that is missing from the existing literature. Our results have implications for the wider social effects of immigration and how foreign languages are taught in schools.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.