On the influence of the first writing system on second writing acquisition in bilingual German-French primary school context

by Anne Lorenz (University of Leipzig, Germany & University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg)

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With the acquisition of the German writing system, children gain, among other things, insights into the phonographic principle, but also into the other structuring principles of the German written language (cf. Bredel et al. 2011). If they acquire another alphabetic written language, it becomes clear that these principles in the second written language are different. Exemplary for German and French are vowels that are spelled differently, e.g. /u/ as <u> in German and <ou> in French. The fundamental questions arise here, which are also guiding for the presented doctoral project: How do children deal with these  deviations?  Do  they  use  their  written  language resources  from  their  first writing  acquisition for writing in the second writing system, or do they form their own writing system rules of their written interlanguage? 

To answer these questions, children from a bilingual German-French primary school in Leipzig, Germany, were studied over a period of three years. The main data include French  spellings  at  word,  sentence  and  text  level. The  children's  French  spellings  are  coded using a self-created category system and thus evaluated using interlanguage analysis. The spellings are flanked by the survey of spelling competences in German, by classroom observations  and  the  collection  of  biographical  language  information  from  the children. The binational dissertation project “Processes in the acquisition of writing by bilingual German-French primary school children. An empirical longitudinal study on the influence of the first-writing system on second-writing acquisition” started in 2020, is expected to end in 2024 and conducts relevant basic research in the field of multilingualism, which provides in-depth insights into multilingual (German-French) writing acquisition processes in primary school. Since the assumption is still widely held in educational policy that the early introduction of a second writing system in primary school  leads  to a negative influence or even disruption of  first-writing acquisition, the results of the project can contribute to clarifying this educational policy tension. The poster will provide insight into the fresh longitudinal results of the project. 

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References: 

Bredel, U./Furhop, N./Noack, C. (2012): Wie Kinder lesen und schreiben lernen. Tübingen: Francke. 

Neef, M. (2012): Graphematics as part of a modular theory of phonographic writing systems. In: Writing Systems Research 4(2), 214–228. 

Noack, C./Weth, C. (2012): Orthographie- und Schriftspracherwerb in mehreren Sprachen – ein Forschungsüberblick. In: Grießhaber, W./Kalkavan, Z. (Hrsg.): Orthographie- und Schriftspracherwerb bei mehrsprachigen Kindern. Freiburg: Filibach, 15-34.