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

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.