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As bilingual students often achieve lower scores than monolinguals in single-language vocabulary assessments, a deficit-oriented view of bilingualism is widespread in educational institutions. This study examined whether this alleged difference remains when the conceptual vocabulary scores of bilingual primary students are considered, and when home language and literacy activities are taken into account.

Extensive expressive vocabulary measures were administered in both the environmental language (German) and the heritage language (Turkish) to simultaneous and sequential bilingual students, and to their monolingual peers. Their parents provided information about the frequency of home language and literacy activities.

The study included 302 students (5;9–10;9 years). 83 were simultaneous bilingual, 55 sequential bilingual and 164 monolingual. Comparisons on vocabulary were …