Resilience in multicultural classrooms: do positive relationships moderate the language proficiency-school adjustment link?

Background: According to the risk and resilience model (Motti-Stefanidi & Masten, 2017), protective factors can attenuate the effect of risks and challenges on children’s adjustment. For immigrant and refugee children, supportive relationships in the new context can be particularly beneficial. We expected that supportive school relationships play a protective role for the school adjustment of first-generation immigrant and refugee and non-immigrant children, by moderating the effect of one acculturative challenge (i.e., school language proficiency). Aims: We investigated the moderating roles of teacher-child and peer relationship quality on the association between German language proficiency and school adjustment (i.e., school achievement and belongingness) among first-generation immigrant and refugee and non-immigrant children.Sample: We recruited n = 278 fourth grade children (Mage= 10.47, SDage = 0.55, 53.24% female; 37% first-generation immigrant and refugee children)Methods: Questionnaires assessed children’s reported teacher-child and peer relationship quality and school belongingness. One test measured children’s German proficiency. School achievement was assessed by their grade point average (GPA) and by a reading comprehension test. To investigate our hypotheses, we performed bias corrected factor score path analyses. Results: School relationship did not moderate most of the associations between German proficiency and school adjustment. However, peer relationship quality buffered the effect of German proficiency on school belongingness among non-immigrant children only. Teacher-child relationship quality exacerbated the positive association between German proficiency and GPA. Conclusions: Teacher-child and peer relationship quality can be beneficial for the school adjustment of both first-generation immigrant and refugee children and non-immigrant children.