Читать книгу English in Elementary Schools - Anja Steinlen - Страница 13

English and German belong to the West Germanic language family and share many similarities regarding phonology, spelling, morphology, lexis, syntax and the alphabet as their writing system, and are, therefore, characterized as typologically similar languages (e.g., Genesee & Jared, 2008; Frisch, 2013). However, contrastive analyses also recognize many differences in these areas (see König & Gast, 2009 for a detailed description of these linguistic differences). The English spelling system, therefore, poses many problems for beginning learners whose L1 is German (e.g., Frisch, 2013). For example, the German writing system is rather transparent (shallow) with relatively regular phoneme-grapheme correspondences (following the Orthographic Depth Hypothesis, e.g., Frost, 2005). In German, the letter combination <sch> usually corresponds to the sound /ʃ/ (e.g., Schuh, Tisch, Asche). English, though, exhibits many irregular phoneme-grapheme correspondences and it is, therefore, considered a deep (opaque) writing system. For example, the sound /ʃ/ may be spelt <sh> (shoe), <ti> (nation), <ch> (machine), <s> (sure), <ss> (issue), <ci> (social) or <ce> (ocean), to name just a few (e.g., Eckert & Barry, 2002).

The different orthographic characteristics of German and English often lead to interlingual transfer in the spelling performance of students learning English. In particular, the deep orthography of the English language also influences the less complex German written language, and transfer effects are assumed (and found) because students apply specific spelling strategies of their L1 to the target language. Such strategies may include the phonemic route to spelling (where the L2 words are spelt like they sound, e.g. *<schur> instead of <sure>), the visual route to spelling (where the L2 words, particularly familiar and high-frequency ones, are retrieved as a whole, using visual imagery of the word, e.g. <the>) and the use of metalinguistic knowledge, which includes knowledge about the L2 and its irregularities and regularities, for example when two words share the same root but are pronounced differently (e.g., <sign> and <signal>, e.g., Frisch, 2013; James & Klein, 1994; Reichart Wallrabenstein, 2004).

In sum, this chapter provided information with respect to the development of reading and writing skills in the L1 and in the L2. The examples above also point to the complex (and also crosslinguistic) relationship between reading and writing (see e.g., Schoonen, 2019 for a review), which will certainly affect the outcomes of any (foreign) language literacy test, including the ones presented here.