Читать книгу English in Elementary Schools - Anja Steinlen - Страница 6

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.