In order to succeed within the German school system, immigrant children need to have mastered the German language. Exposure to the host country's language is an important factor in immigrants' acquisition of the second language. Kindergarten affords such exposure to the German language to immigrant children of preschool age. Data from the school entrance examination of the City of Osnabrück for the years 2000 to 2005 show that deficits in German skills are less likely to occur among immigrant children the longer they have attended Kindergarten. Furthermore, methods of multilevel analysis are used to detect differences among Kindergartens with regard to the average level of German language deficits. While for Turkish-child differences from the one to the other Kindergarten are significant, no such group differences exist for ethnic-German (but non-German-speaking) children from the former Soviet Union. The variance in the German language deficits among Kindergartens found in the sample of Turkish-background children can be clearly reduced by taking into account the proportion of immigrant children in the Kindergartens, and it disappears completely once the proportion of Turkish children is accounted for. With regard to the Turkish children, the results indicate that a high proportion of children of the same ethnic origin in Kindergartens fosters linguistic separation in these institutions and in this way hampers their acquisition of the German language © Lucius & Lucius Verlag Stuttgart.

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