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

Quantity and quality of German vowels produced by learners with L1 Russian

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

The effect of a syntactic training on multilingual fifth graders' spelling patterns of noun capitalization in German

Silent orthographic syntactic markers, such as capitalisation of nouns in German are prone to error throughout schooling. The present study explores the spelling patterns related to capitalisation in multilingual pupils with German as a second language and investigates the efficiency of a syntax-based teaching approach of capitalisation for pupils’ spelling performance (n = 246). The results show, firstly, that pupils with German as a second language show similar capitalisation patterns influenced by lexico-semantic and positional factors as pupils with German as a first language. Secondly, the results suggest that a syntax-based teaching approach to capitalisation of nouns is highly effective especially for nominalizations. The study supports the assumption that stimulating pupils’ attention to syntactic structures is beneficial for spelling when these features are represented clearly and regularly in the writing system, but not in phonology

The reflexion about French and German morphosyntactic structures and their influence on the spelling performance of fifth graders.

Wie verhalt sich ein explizites Grammatik-/Orthographietraining zu der meta- sprachlichen Reflexion der SchUler/innen? Dazu stellt der Vortrag Ergebnisse der Studie MorphoSyn vor. Die lnterventionsstudie ist in der 5. Klasse in Luxemburgi- schen Grundschulen verortet. ln der Studie mit Pre-/Posttest Design (N=280) er- halt die lnterventionsgruppe (N=140) ein Training zur ldentifizierung und Schrei- bung von nominalen Kernen (Deutsch) sowie ein Training zur ldentifizierung und Markierung von Singular-Plural Kongruenz (Franzosisch). Das Training umfasst 6 Einheiten zu je 20 Minuten pro Sprache. Ziel der Studie ist es zu ermitteln, ob sich die Rechtschreibleistungen der SchUler/innen in den trainierten Bereichen wesent- lich verbessern. Eine SchUlergruppe wurde Uber den gesamten Zeitraum der lntervention gefilmt. Videoausschnitte geben Aufschluss darUber, welche metasprachliche Reflexion in den Trainingseinheiten stattfindet und wie sich das Regelverstehen der lnterven- tion manifestiert

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

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

Spelling patterns of plural marking and learning trajectories in French taught as a foreign language

International audienceAlthough French plural spelling has been studied extensively, the complexity of factors affecting the learning of French plural spelling are not yet fully explained, namely on the level of adjectival and verbal plural. This study investigates spelling profiles of French plural markers of 228 multilingual grade 5 pupils with French taught as a foreign language.Three analyses on the learner performances of plural spelling in nouns, verbs and pre- and postnominal attributive adjectives were conducted (1) to detect the pupils’ spelling profiles of plural marking on the basis of the performances in the pretest, (2) to test the profiles against two psycholinguistic theories, and (3) to evaluate the impact of the training on each spelling profile in the posttest.The first analysis confirms the existing literature that pupils’ learning of French plural is not random but ordered and emphasizes the role of the position for adjectives (pre- or postnominal) on correct plural spelling. The second analysis reveals the theoretical difficulties of predicting spelling of adjectival and verbal plural. The third analysis shows that strong and poor spellers both benefit from a morphosyntactic training and provides transparency and traceability of the learning trajectories.Together, the descriptive analyses reveal clear patterns of intra-individual spelling profiles. They point to a need for further research in those areas that have empirically provided the most inconsistent results to date and that are not supported by the theories: verbs and adjectives

Assessing spelling skills related to morphosyntax of German-French biliterate pupils in a multilingual educational context

How do multilingual learners write spellings related to morphosyntactic information in German (capitalisation of nouns) and French (plural markers of nouns, adjectives and verbs)? Our talk presents the construction and the items of a spelling test of German and French for multilingual 5th graders in Luxembourg (N=300) as well as the first results of both tests. It is the pre-test of a study that will analyse the processes of morphosyntactic agreement in spelling in the children’s first (German) and second (French) acquired language at school. It will further examine how their performances relate to their language background. The setting in Luxembourg is characterised by three school languages: While Luxembourgish is the language of pre-school, children are alphabetised in German and learn French from second grade on. German and French are second languages for most children. However, children have either a Germanic (Luxembourgish) or a Romance (Portuguese) background. The children performed spellings tests tailored to the specificities of each of the test languages but relying on comparable grammatical processes. The test framework will be presented in detail as well as first results. Based on the literature, we expect differences in performances for proper and abstract nouns as well as nominalisation with best performance for proper nouns. In French, we expect differences in performances according to the plural markers of nouns, adjectives and verbs with best performance for nouns. Additionally, we expect contextual effects of the target words within each language. Results will further be analysed according to the background language of the children