Morphosyntactic spelling German and French as second (written) languages in the Luxembourgish context

Presentation (2019, April 05)

Apprendre à écrire des informations orthographiques silencieuses en langue seconde : Effets d'un programme d'entraînement sur les performances et suivis intra- et interindividuel du développement des patterns de production du pluriel

Scientific Conference (2018, August 04)

The effect of training morphosyntactic markers in German and in French on multilingual fifth-graders' spelling.

Scientific Conference (2017, June 26)

Many studies focussing on spelling in French and German languages show that, even by the end of the primary school, pupils have difficulties to encode morphosyntactic information in their writing ... [more ▼]

Many studies focussing on spelling in French and German languages show that, even by the end of the primary school, pupils have difficulties to encode morphosyntactic information in their writing. Particularly problematic are, for instance, capitalisation of nouns in German (Betzel 2014) or plural markers in French (Fayol et al. 2006), because they are inaudible and require knowledge that goes beyond simple phoneme-grapheme correspondences. Our paper presents how multilingual learners deal with silent morphosyntactic markers in French and German and shows the effects of an intervention training on children's spelling performance. In total our study included 228 multilingual fifth graders (mean age 11 years) with four years instruction in German and two years instruction in French. They were assigned to an intervention (n=137) and to a control group (n=91) based on the results of a spelling test in French and German. This was done by creating performance groups that were, in a second step, attributed to one of the experimental groups taking their performance into account (quasi-randomised procedure). The French test consisted of three word categories of different difficulty (nouns, verbs, adjectives). For adjectives only, position (pre- vs. post-nominal) was also manipulated. The German test focussed on three lexical-semantic characteristics (concrete nouns, abstract nouns, nominalizations) and four syntactical positions (determinant+noun, determinant+adjective+noun, adjective+noun, noun) frequent words and pseudo-words. Additionally, word frequency was manipulated within each language (frequent words vs. pseudowords). These difficulty levels have been based on the literature published on monolingual learners (French: Totereau et al. (2014), German: Funke (2005); Guenther (2007); Betzel (2014)). The children participated in 12 intervention sessions of 20 minutes each (six in German and six in French, the order was counterbalanced). Children of the intervention group were trained to improve their morphosyntactic awareness and thus spelling performance of French plurals and German capitalization. The control group received the same amount of language input than the intervention group, but they were trained on another aspect of language i.e. listening comprehension. Results from the pre-test show that multilingual children acquiring German and French show similar difficulty patterns as German or French monolinguals. The post-test shows that the intervention group improved significantly in both their German and French spelling in comparison to the control group in all word and pseudo-word categories and positions. The intervention group's performance increased especially on pseudo-words, indicating that the training had an effect on children's spelling according to syntactic regularities. The study results are specifically important to better understand the learning processes of morphosyntactic spelling in primary school. The implications on the teaching methods will be discussed. [less ▲]

The effect of a French intervention on children´s spelling of morphosyntactic agreement.

Poster (2016, July)

The purpose of our project MorphoSyn is to gain insights into the morphosyntactic processing involved in spelling in second languages. We conduct our study in the complex language context of Luxembourg ... [more ▼]

The purpose of our project MorphoSyn is to gain insights into the morphosyntactic processing involved in spelling in second languages. We conduct our study in the complex language context of Luxembourg which has two written school languages (German and French) and a large variety languages spoken at children´s home. More specifically, we investigate how an explicit teaching of morphosyntactic structures in written German and French enhance the spelling competence of 5th grade students. During our intervention we focus on two orthographic features: the capitalisation of nouns in German and subject-verb agreement and the agreement within nouns phrases in French. Studies from Germany and France show that the acquisition of these features pass quite difficultly, because they are inaudible and, to grasp them, students need knowledge that goes beyond phoneme-grapheme correspondences. We predicted that our multilingual pupils will encounter the same problems that have been detected for French and German monolingual children. Our recently conducted pilot study confirmed this assumption: many children still omit plural/feminine markers in French and fail to capitalize abstract nouns or nominalisations in German. Our paper will present the outcome of the pre-test administrated to 250 Luxembourgish students (listening comprehension and dictation in German and French). It will show the orthographic skills pupils have acquired during primary school in their school languages German and French and indicate how far they are using morphosyntactic information while spelling. [less ▲]

Quantität und Qualität deutscher Vokale bei Lernern mit der L1 Russisch

Bachelor/master dissertation (2012)

Die deutsche Sprache hat ein reiches Vokalsystem. Eine Besonderheit dieses Systems ist die Existenz der sogenannten Kurz- und Langvokale, die bedeutungsunterscheidend sind (Miete und Mitte, Höhle und ... [more ▼]

Die deutsche Sprache hat ein reiches Vokalsystem. Eine Besonderheit dieses Systems ist die Existenz der sogenannten Kurz- und Langvokale, die bedeutungsunterscheidend sind (Miete und Mitte, Höhle und Hölle, Staat und Stadt). Diese zwei Gruppen von Vokalen werden unterschiedlich lang und unterschiedlich gespannt ausgesprochen. Solche Qualitäts- und Quantitätsunterschiede sind nicht für alle Sprachen typisch, deswegen stellt der Erwerb der deutschen Vokale eine Herausforderung für viele Lerner dar. Diese Unterschiede machen aber nicht nur den Lernern des Deutschen viel Mühe, sondern auch den Sprachwissenschaftlern, die sich mit dem deutschen Phonemsystem auseinandersetzen. Linguisten, die in diesem Forschungsgebiet tätig sind, diskutieren immer noch über das entscheidende distinktive Merkmal der deutschen Vokale. Ist es die Quantität oder die Qualität? Das Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit ist, die Frage aus einer anderen Perspektive zu betrachten. Ich werde überprüfen, wie russischsprachige Lerner des Deutschen mit diesen beiden Parametern umgehen. Was erwerben diese Lerner, in deren Muttersprache weder die Länge noch die Gespanntheit der Vokale bedeutungsunterscheidend sind? [less ▲]