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

Abstract

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