The influx of Ukrainian students followed Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Nearly 9,000 refugee children enrolled in Estonian schools in a short period, creating a unique opportunity for researchers to observe how kids learn Estonian from scratch in a real-world classroom setting.

Tallinn University (TLÜ) Estonian language professor Reili Argus and her team followed 10- to 12-year-old students over the course of a year, tracking their Estonian language development.

The researchers compared Ukrainian refugee children who arrived in Estonia with no prior knowledge of the language with local children, mostly Russian-speaking, who had attended Estonian-language kindergartens.

To assess language skills, Argus' team used a picture description method, in which each child was shown the same image and asked to describe what they saw.

Created specifically for the study, Tuuliki Kivestu's "Summer" depicts a colorful beach scene rich with detail, including three generations of family doing various things on the shore and in the water, a beach umbrella and beach chairs, a picnic blanket, a dog under a beach chair, and some seagulls and sailboats.

Argus explained that the wide range of details were meant to give children the chance to use singular and plural forms, name different colors, and describe relative positions, such as on or behind, as well as different sizes.

Refugees' vocabularies grew faster

Those with limited Estonian skills typically named objects, like tool (chair), ema (mother), lind (bird), päike (sun) and meri (the sea).

More advanced speakers, meanwhile, often told cohesive stories, describing what various family members were doing and how they were feeling — such as the frowning adult applying sunscreen after already starting to get a sunburn.

The study measured vocabulary growth in 2024 and 2025. In the span of a year, Ukrainian refugee children had increased their vocabulary by a dozen words on average, while local non-native Estonian speakers gained an average of six.

Early verbs among the Ukrainian children included magama (to sleep), lamama (to lie down), seisma (to stand) and ujuma (to swim).

By the second year, their speech had expanded to include mental and action verbs, such as "Ma arvan, et see on" ("I think that is") and "Ma mõtlen, et ta teeb seda" ("I think they're doing this").

"They even used the words hüüab (shouts), päevitab (sunbathes), ronib (climbs), and one kid even said tšillib," the professor said.

Broad verb knowledge, she noted, allows for richer storytelling than merely naming objects would.

Argus stressed that language learning needs to move quickly from just naming nouns to describing actions and using grammatical forms. Otherwise, students may end up with a lot of vocabulary, but little ability to string it together into a sentence.

She recalled taking a taxi once with a driver from Pakistan who had completed A1- and A2-level Estonian courses, but still felt he couldn't actually speak it at all.

"He started listing days of the week, colors, family members, numbers, honestly a huge number of words," she said. "But he didn't know how to form sentences."

No expected advantage

Argus said the results of the study ultimately surprised her, as they had hypothesized that children who were born and raised in Estonia and even attended Estonian-language kindergarten would have had a clear advantage over their refugee peers.

"The two groups were nearly equal," the professor said. "Local children were slightly better in verb constructions, but overall vocabulary differences were not significant."

The findings suggest that Estonian-language kindergartens may not always provide as strong a foundation as expected, and that language instruction may be inconsistent in at least some of them, she added.

Motivation, however, appeared crucial. The Ukrainian children showed a strong drive to integrate, whereas local non-native Estonian speaking children often managed with Russian alone.

Previous research has often found refugee children's language development lags somewhat behind other immigrant learners, often due to trauma and social challenges, but this pattern was not identified in Argus' study.

Support also key

Classroom composition, meaning whether a class was mixed with Estonian-speakers or all-Ukrainian, also had less of an impact than expected, particularly in small, engaged classes of 14–15 students in schools with fully supportive faculty and staff.

In one classroom where Argus had dropped in to observe, the teacher did not speak Ukrainian or Russian, and taught the Ukrainian students entirely in Estonian. Still, everything worked smoothly, she said.

"The kids mostly spoke Ukrainian or Russian among themselves because they just didn't have the Estonian vocabulary yet, but the teacher always spoke to them in Estonian, and the children spoke in Estonian with the teacher too," she said.

The biggest takeaway of their research, Argus said, is that when it comes to successfully learning Estonian, teacher competence and engagement, combined with student motivation, matter far more than kindergarten background.

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