English in Elementary Schools

Research and Implications on Minority and Majority Language Children's Reading and Writing Skills in Regular and Bilingual Programs

Anja Steinlen

• Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9783823384519
• eBook ISBN: 9783823302520
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

An increasing number of multilingual students, often with a migration background, are attending elementary schools in Germany these days. Also on the rise is the number of schools offering a bilingual program, where content subjects such as science and mathematics are taught in a foreign language. This book explores minority and majority language students' German and English reading and writing skills in elementary schools which offer either regular English-as-subject lessons or bilingual programs with varying degrees of English intensity. The focus is on effects of foreign language input intensity with respect to students' language background, gender, cognitive abilities, and socio-economic background. This book also provides recommendations for English reading and writing activities in the elementary school classroom.

1. Introduction

This book deals with the development of literacy skills in elementary schools in Germany1, which offer English programs with different degrees of intensity, ranging from regular programs (with English-as-a-subject for two hours per week) to bilingual programs, in which one subject or several subjects (such as science, math, or music) are taught in the new language (in this case English). Literacy skills (i.e., reading and writing skills) constitute the focus of this book because they play a key role in the acquisition of academic knowledge and participation in education and society. Of special interest are minority language children (sometimes also called “children with a migration background”) who have often been reported to constitute an “at-risk group” in terms of academic achievement in school.

In second and foreign language research, various factors have been claimed to affect language learning (e.g., Kersten, 2019, for a review). These effects are often subdivided into child-internal and child-external factors. Child-internal factors, for example, may include language skills (i.e., knowledge and proficiency in the first, second and any additional language), gender, cognitive skills (e.g., nonverbal intelligence, working memory, phonological short-term memory, phonological awareness, executive control) as well as personality factors (e.g., traits, attitudes, motivation). Child-external factors involve the learner’s family/social environment (e.g., parental education, socio-economic background, early cognitive stimulation, cultural capital), the environment in which the language is learned (which, for the educational context, may refer to educational policies, administration, program intensity and duration, teachers and classmates) as well as language input (provided by the teacher at school, which may vary in terms of quality). All these internal and external factors (and many more) affect children’s development in any language.

However, a great number of studies have shown inconsistent results regarding the impact of individual factors. For example, some studies have reported gender to play an important role in (foreign) language acquisition (e.g., BIG-Kreis, 2015), while others have not (e.g., Schmenk, 2002). Inconsistencies have also been reported with respect to students with a minority language background (who often have a migration background). In some studies, such students performed lower on foreign language tests (e.g., Elsner, 2010), while in other studies they performed just as well as comparable majority language peers (e.g., Kessler & Paulick, 2010). It is the aim of this book to disentangle some of these effects and to describe their impact in more detail, especially with regard to German and English reading and writing skills in the elementary school context.

Therefore, the purposes of this book are a) to provide a summary of the research covering minority language children and language learning in various elementary school programs with different degrees of foreign language intensity; b) to introduce new, unpublished data to extend said research findings; and finally, c) to present recommendations regarding foreign language reading and writing activites in the elementary school classroom. The outline of this book is as follows:

Chapter 2 presents a comprehensive literature review on the reading and writing skills of elementary school children. Characteristics of reading and writing in different acquisition settings are illustrated in chapter 2.1. Chapters 2.2 and 2.3 compare the curricular guidelines of regular and bilingual programs, as well as the supply of staff and materials in such programs; it also presents findings of empirical (often large-scale) studies on L1 (first language) and L2 (second / foreign language) reading and writing skills in Germany and elsewhere. Furthermore, in chapters 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, and 2.7, respectively, studies are reviewed which examine the effects of children’s language background, their gender, their cognitive background, and their social background on their reading and writing skills in German and English.

Additional data are introduced in chapters 3 to 6. This new and hitherto unpublished study examines the overall effects of foreign language intensity with a large sample of fourth graders (N = 487), who attended one of four different elementary school programs differing in English intensity. Of special interest are not only effects of intensity but also effects of children’s language background, their gender, and their cognitive and social background, on their reading and writing skills in German and English. Chapter 3 presents the research questions; chapter 4 introduces the schools, the test materials and the subjects. The results of this study are illustrated in chapter 5 and discussed in detail in chapter 6, which also acknowledges the limitations of the study and, consequently, proposes ideas for further research.

Chapter 7 is devoted to recommendations for teaching reading and writing in the FL elementary school classroom. Many of these recommendations include ideas for the literacy-rich classroom, such as different types of scaffolding to facilitate students’ reading and writing output, as well as awareness-raising activities, which are embedded in authentic and relevant contexts (chapters 7.1 to 7.6). As spelling often is a neglected area in FL classrooms, chapter 7.7 deals with invented spelling, spelling activities, the role of spelling errors and teaching spelling rules, including recommendations on how to give feedback on student writing (chapter 7.8). Many of the recommendations for reading and writing activities presented in chapter 7 are not only aimed at teachers in FL classrooms, (in particular bilingual ones) but also at those teaching German-as-a-second / foreign language to students with family languages other than German, because in both contexts the focus is on fostering the target language while teaching subject content.

A brief conclusion is presented in chapter 8, and references are listed in chapter 9.

2. Literature review

The focus of the following literature review is on children’s language background (reviewed in chapter 2.4) and their institutional environment (i.e., program intensity, see chapters 2.2 and 2.3), because the present study deals with the linguistic development of minority and majority language children in elementary schools with different degrees of English intensity. However, other factors are also included. Chapter 2.5 reviews effects of gender on elementary schoolers’ development of German and English, and chapter 2.6 focuses on students’ cognitive skills, with special reference to nonverbal intelligence. Finally, chapter 2.7 deals with effects of students’ family and social environment, particularly with those relating to the parents’ educational background. As this study focuses on reading and writing, definitions and models of L1 (first language) and L2 (second / foreign language) reading and writing are provided at the beginning of chapter 2 (i.e., in chapter 2.1).

2.1 Definitions

In this section, the terms “reading” and “writing” are defined, and reading and writing skills and processes are described in relation to L1 and L2 acquisition. Note that in this section, the term “L2” subsumes both second and foreign language acquisition. Minority language students’ foreign language reading and writing skills (which often constitute their L3) will be discussed in chapter 2.4.

Literacy is traditionally defined as the ability to read and write, but this concept has evolved in meaning. The modern meaning of the term has been expanded to include the ability to use language, numbers, images, computers, and other basic means to understand, communicate, gain useful knowledge, solve mathematical problems and use the dominant symbol systems of a culture (e.g., UNESCO, 2012). However, in this book, the term “literacy” will refer only to reading and writing skills.

2.1.1 L1 reading

Reading as such is nowadays understood as a comprehension process that occurs when the reader extracts and integrates information from the text and combines it with what is already known (e.g., Koda, 2005: 4). According to the OECD (2000: 21), reading literacy can be defined as the ability “to understand, use and reflect on written texts in order to achieve one’s goals, to develop one’s knowledge and potential, and to participate effectively in society”. These comprehension skills depend, among other things, on reading speed, which requires a high degree of short-term memory. Other determinants of reading competence include world knowledge, the ability to rapidly access lexical items, broad and in-depth vocabulary knowledge, reading motivation, a positive attitude towards reading, knowledge of text features, reading strategies, and other basic cognitive skills (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF, 2007).

The reading process is characterized by an interaction of top-down and bottom-up processes (see e.g., Frisch, 2010; Thaler, 2012). In the latter, the reader recognizes meaning from the written text and moves from the individual parts to the whole, i.e., from letter, to syllable, to word, to phrase, to clause, to sentence, to paragraph and to the text (Grabe, 2009). In addition, meaning is derived via top-down processes with the reader at the center of the reading process: in order to infer meaning, s/he uses general background knowledge, world knowledge and thematic knowledge, formal schemata (e.g., knowledge of text genres and text structures), content schemata (e.g., knowledge about the time in which a text was written), and finally scripts (i.e., knowledge about typical processes, e.g., how to check in at a hotel). These two processes continually interact: “The ‘construction’ of meaning that occurs in reading is a combination of ‘bottom-up’ processes […] and ‘top-down’ ones […]” (Ur, 1996: 141).

L1 reading comprehension is generally preceded and affected by reading fluency. At a reasonable reading rate of approximately 250-300 words per minute, a reader is using very fast and efficient word recognition skills on the sublexical, lexical, and connected text levels, combining information from different sources while reading under rather intense time constraints (Grabe, 2010). That is to say, fluent reading includes both word-level reading skills and language processing/comprehension skills (e.g., Jenkins, Fuchs, Van den Broek, Espin & Deno, 2003). In general, reading fluency is associated with the ability to read rapidly with ease and accuracy, and to read with appropriate expression and phrasing. It involves a long learning process, and text comprehension is an expected result of fluent reading (see, e.g., Grabe, 2009).

Several developmental models of L1 reading have been put forward, most notably by Frith (1985) and Ehri (1995, see Kennedy, Dunphy, Dwyer, Hayes, McPhillips, Marsh, O’Connor & Shiel 2010 for a detailed review). Frith (1985) differentiated three stages, namely the logographic, alphabetic and orthographic stages. In the logographic stage, children use visual or graphic features to read words, while in the alphabetic stage, grapheme-phoneme relations are used to process words. In the orthographic stage, children are finally able to use spelling patterns. Ehri (1995) proposed a similar developmental model which comprises four phases of reading development to identify the significant advances that occur as children learn to read. The four phases are pre-alphabetic, partial alphabetic, full alphabetic and consolidated alphabetic. During the pre-alphabetic phase (which corresponds to Frith’s logographic stage) children rely on selected visual features (and not on letter-sound connections) to read words. Although they are essentially non-readers, they may ‘read’ environmental print from the contextual clues they notice. As children then learn the names and sounds of letters, they progress to the partial-alphabetic phase where they form connections between only some of the letters and sounds (often just the first and final letter sounds). During this phase they cannot segment sounds and will have difficulty decoding unfamiliar words, i.e., they do not have full knowledge of the alphabetic system yet. When children have reached the full-alphabetic phase, they learn sight words (i.e. words that are commonly used in reading and writing) and make connections between letters in written words and the corresponding sounds in speech; however, they use mainly grapheme-phoneme correspondences to identify words. Finally, the consolidated-alphabetic phase represents the children’s growing knowledge and use of specific orthographic patterns, as well as knowledge of morphological patterns and syllabic units.

Such models (as proposed by Frith, Ehri and others) have also been criticized because the order of the stages is fixed and identical for all children; because no stage can be skipped so that proceeding to the next stage results only from mastery of the previous stage; because performance in the middle of each stage is homogenous; and because progression is characterized by qualitative changes, as processing strategies seem to differ radically from one stage to the next (e.g., Sprenger-Charolles & Casalis, 1996).

2.1.2 L2 reading

Unlike L1 reading and writing, reading and writing in an L2 always involves the interaction of different languages. As Koda (2007: 1) points out, this “dual-language involvement implies continual interactions in between the two languages as well as incessant adjustments in accommodating the disparate demands each language imposes”. In other words, L2 reading and writing are inherently more complex than L1 reading and writing.

In Grabe’s view (e.g., 2009; 2014: 10ff.), differences between L1 and L2 reading center around the linguistic resources that are available to the L2 reader. For example, L2 readers have limited L2 language skills (i.e., knowledge of grammar, vocabulary and discourse structure) when they begin reading. Furthermore, L2 students have less experience with reading exposure in the L2 and consequently less practice in L2 reading. In addition, L2 readers need to develop somewhat distinct cognitive processing which involves two language systems, using a joint strategy system, (e.g. Koda, 2005). Interference from the L1 (i.e., cognitive skills, strategies, goals and expectations) may affect L2 reading and either facilitate or hinder its outcomes. Finally, L2 readers rely on different combinations of general background knowledge when reading in the L2 because “world knowledge” (e.g., social and cultural assumptions in texts) may vary between L1 and L2 reading experiences.

So far, L2 reading comprehension has been studied more frequently than L2 reading fluency, and there are far fewer studies dealing with reading fluency in the L2 than in the L1 (e.g., Grabe, 2010). Determinants of L2 reading fluency seem to be the same as those for L1 reading fluency and include automatic word recognition, a large recognition vocabulary, skilled grammatical processing, and automaticity and chunking (i.e., the detection of larger units). Several studies have shown L1 reading fluency skills to affect L2 fluency skills, and L2 reading comprehension to affect L2 reading fluency and vice versa, although the effects so far seem to be rather moderate (see e.g., Grabe, 2010: 73).

Stages in L2 reading seem to parallel those in L1 reading. For example, Verhoeven & Van Leeuwe (2012) extended to L2 reading the Simple View of Reading Framework from Hoover and Gough (1990), which places reading comprehension as a product of word reading (decoding) and listening comprehension. Verhoeven & Van Leeuwe (2012) found that the word decoding skills of L1 and L2 learners (in the long run) seem to develop at more or less equal rates, probably due to the fact that many L2 learners have already acquired essentials of the target language in the domains of phonology and orthography. The same seems to apply to reading fluency: for example, O’Brien & Wallot (2016) reported that the transition from fluent reading of words to texts emerges roughly at the same time for the L1 and the L2, namely in grade 4, i.e., around age 10.

Following Frisch (2013), there are currently three models to account for the relationship between L1 and L2 reading, namely the Interdependence Hypothesis, the Threshold Hypothesis and the Transfer Hypothesis. According to the Interdependence Hypothesis (e.g., Cummins, 1991), the development of L2 reading is affected by the cognitive and general linguistic skills in the L1, and in particular by L1 reading skills. Many studies have shown that cognitive, linguistic and reading skills in the L1 predict L2 reading skills (e.g., Van der Leij, Bekebrede & Kotterink, 2010) and that there is a high correlation between L1 and L2 reading skills (e.g., Skutnabb-Kangas & Toukomaa, 1976). The Threshold Hypothesis posits that “some minimal threshold of proficiency in the L2 must be attained in order for the reader’s first language reading skills to transfer to reading in the second language” (Carroll & Grabe, 2010: 223). Thus, a certain level of L2 proficiency is necessary before L1 reading strategies and skills can be utilized effectively in L2 reading. An important prerequisite is a learning context that promotes overall L2 language proficiency, at least for lower-level students. So far, however, empirical data are scarce regarding the nature of such a threshold. Finally, language proximity...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titel
• Impressum
• Inhaltsverzeichnis
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Literature review
• 3. Research questions
• 4. Method
• 5. Results
• 6. Discussion
• 7. Recommendations for teaching reading and writing in the FL classroom
• 8. Conclusion
• 9. References
• Fußnoten