Anja Steinlen

Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg | FAU · Department of Foreign Language Teaching

This study presents productive L2 French grammar data obtained at the end of grade 1 from 186 elementary school children learning French in bilingual (CLIL) or in regular school programs in Germany. The children completed a picture description task to assess their productive oral L2 French grammar skills and two standardized cognitive tests on nonv...

Die dem Schulversuch „Lernen in zwei Sprachen – Bilinguale Grundschule Englisch“ folgende Anschlussuntersuchung, die an über 120 weiterführenden Schulen in Bayern durchgeführt wird, hat zum Ziel, in den Jahrgangsstufen 5 bis 7 Erkenntnisse über den weiteren Bildungsverlauf ehemals bilingual unterrichteter Grundschülerinnen und -schüler (SuS) zu gew...

Many studies have shown that most pupils attending bilingual programmes develop much higher levels of foreign language proficiency than pupils in regular foreign language lessons. In this paper, we will first illustrate similarities and differences between teaching strategies used in regular English lessons and in bilingual programmes. Then we will...

Since foreign language (FL) teaching has been firmly anchored in the subjects taught at primary school in Germany, numerous results of studies have shown very good results regarding the FL performance of young learners. It is, therefore, surprising, that some federal states in Germany moved back the start of FL lessons from class 1 to class 3, alth...

This volume examines interactions between second/foreign language acquisition and the development of cognitive abilities in learners who acquire an additional language in preschools, primary or secondary schools. The different chapters do not only address possible links between linguistic and cognitive development, but they also examine effects of...

Since the beginning of the 20th century, a large number of studies have examined cognitive abilities such as metalinguistic awareness, intelligence, mental flexibility and cognitive/executive control shown by learners learning more than one language at home or in different educational institutions. The results of many of these studies suggest that...

This paper examines the role of non-verbal intelligence of children attending either a partial immersion (IM) programme or a regular foreign language (FL) programme in a school in Germany, with a focus on grade 1 and grade 4. Using Raven’s Progressive Matrices tests as an index of non-verbal intelligence, significant differences between the childre...

In vielen Studien wird daraufhingewiesen, dass Kinder mit Türkisch als Erstsprache (L1) in Tests zum Deutschen und Englischen schlechter abschneiden als ihre Altersgenossen mit Deutsch als L1. In diesem Beitrag stehen die schriftsprachlichen Leistungen von türkischsprachigen ViertklässlerInnen im Deutschen und Englischen im Vordergrund. Die 154 Gru...

This volume focuses on the teaching of English as a foreign language to young learners at primary school. The volume features an introduction that covers essentials of teaching English to young learners from a theoretical, empirical, and neuroscientific perspective while also discussing the notion of a principled mindset, competence development, tr...

This paper focuses on the reading and writing skills of two groups of learners: a) minority language children learning to read and write in the L2 German and the L3 English in elementary school and b) fully or partially illiterate adult refugees using a digital tool in order to develop first literacy skills in German as a second language (L2). In...

This study examines the English productive vocabulary used by 40 primary school students in Germany who attend two German-English bilingual (immersion) programmes with varying degrees of English input intensity. The students were asked to narrate a story and their vocabulary was analysed in terms of types, tokens and type-token ratio as well as lex...

The present study examined English spelling skills of fourth-graders attending a bilingual German-English primary school programme in Germany. English texts produced by monolingual and multilingual children were examined with regard to orthographic error types and their causes. The results of the English writing test showed that the children reache...

Laut Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung (2018) besitzen 20 % der unter 3 bzw. 30 % aller über 3 Jahre alten Kita -Kinder einen "Migrationshintergrund" (mindestens ein Elternteil ist zugewandert). In durchschnittlich 2,7% (in Berlin sogar in 8,3%) aller Kitas in Deutschland sprechen mehr als 75 % der Kinder in der Familie nicht Deutsch (Länderm...

Der Faktor "Migrationshintergrund" korreliert mit einer Reihe von Faktoren, die die Leistungen von Schülerinnen und Schülern deutlich beeinflussen können: So zeichnen sich Familien mit Migrationshintergrund in Deutschland oftmals durch einen vergleichsweise niedrigeren sozioökonomischen Status und ein geringeres Bildungsniveau aus. Insofern muss im...

This study explores parallels and differences in the comprehension of wh -questions and relative clauses between early foreign-language (FL) learners and monolingual children. We test for (a) effects of syntactic first-language (L1) transfer, (b) the impact of input on syntactic development, and (c) the impact of individual differences on early FL...

The present study deals with the English pronunciation of majority and minority language children attending a German-English elementary school immersion program in Germany. In this program, 50% of the teaching time was conducted in English. By using a reading aloud task, we assessed phonemic accuracy as well as reading fluency in English and relate...

Das Ziel dieser Studie war es, die Englisch- und Deutschleistungen von Schüler(inne)n mit und ohne Migrationshintergrund zu untersuchen, die entweder einen Immersionszweig oder regulären Fremdsprachenunterricht an derselben Schule besucht haben. Im Immersionsprogramm fanden sich keine Unterschiede in den Testergebnissen zwischen Schüler(inne)n mit...

Even though early bilingual foreign language learning has been promoted in Europe for more than a decade now, programs for young learners are still scarce, and more empirical investigation into L2A in such contexts is needed. This paper presents evidence from a longitudinal European project (ELIAS – Early Language and Intercultural Acquisition Stud...

Die in diesem Kapitel diskutierten Forschungsergebnisse weisen darauf hin, dass Mehrsprachigkeit und ein Migrationshintergrund an sich nicht zu schlechteren Leistungen bezüglich bestimmter sprachlicher Teilkompetenzen wie dem Lesen in einer Majoritätensprache wie Deutsch und einer Fremdsprache wie Englisch führen. Bilinguale Angebote und insbesonde...

The present study examined German and English writing skills of children who attended a partial German-English immersion program in a primary school in Germany. From Year 3 to Year 4 the children’ writing improved from level A1 to level A2 (according to the Common European Framework of References, Council of Europe, 2001) in the English writing tes...

Both for the first language (L1) and for all additional languages (L2 or L3), grammatical knowledge plays a vital role in understanding texts (e.g., Grabe 2005). However, little is known about the development and interaction of grammar and reading comprehension in beginning foreign language learning, especially with respect to children with a minor...

In this paper, the influence of gender, language background and social status is examined for primary schoolers' performance in four tests of English as a foreign language. The children attended three different programs, in which the foreign language is taught with varying degrees of intensity (i.e., two lessons per week, 10-20% or 50% of the teach...

Im deutschsprachigen Raum mangelt es bisher nicht nur an konkreten Untersuchungen zu der Frage, wie sich die sprachlichen Fähigkeiten von bilingual betreuten Kindergartenkindern entwickeln, sondern auch an Erfahrungsberichten darüber, wie bilinguale Angebote möglichst gewinnbringend in den Kindergartenalltag integriert werden können. Dieser Sammelb...

Reading skills are among the basic skills acquired during the primary school years, and they play a key role in the acquisition of academic knowledge and later participation in society. Numerous studies have reported that children with a minority language background show deficits in the acquisition of reading skills in mainstream education programs...

According to Genesee & Fortune (2014, 196), children from an "ethnically and linguistically diverse background […] including minority ethnic groups" are often considered 'at-risk' students. This is also the case in Germany, where an immigrant status in conjunction with a first language (L1) background different from the majority language German has...

Der Band „Wortschatzlernen in bilingualen Schulen und Kindertagesstätten“ präsentiert Forschungsergebnisse zur Wortschatzentwicklung bei Lernern in Kindertagesstätten, Grundschulen und weiterführenden Schulen mit bilingualem Unterricht bzw. bilingualer Betreuung. Der Band verdeutlicht, wie sich bilingualer Unterricht/bilinguale Betreuung auf das Wi...

Dieser Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit möglichen Zusammenhängen zwischen der Entwicklung des L2-Wortschatzwissens und des L2-Leseverstehens bei Kindern in einer bilingualen Grundschule, in der alle Fächer außer Deutsch, Mathematik und Religion auf Englisch unterrichtet werden. Der Fokus liegt dabei insbesondere auf einem Vergleich von einsprachig deut...

This paper had two aims: a) to provide a review of studies investigating how children with migration backgrounds perform in tests examining their skills in the majority language of a country as well as their skills in a 3rd language learnt either in regular language-as-subjects lessons or in bilingual programmes such as those following the immersio...

The ELIAS Grammar Test II is a picture pointing test for L2 English grammar reception. It contains 72 items for 12 grammatical phenomena. The test represents an extended version of the ELIAS Grammar Test developed within the EU Comenius Project 'Early Language and Intercultural Acquisition Studies' (Kersten et al. 2010, www.uni-hildesheim.de/elia...

Nowadays, a growing number of preschools offer a foreign language as a daily means of communication. In Germany, this amounts to 1% of all preschools. However, paediatrics may be confronted with parents who worry about the age-appropriate development of their children in such a preschool. The aim of this article is to introduce such bilingual presc...

Drawing on data from eleven preschools in four European countries (Germany, Belgium, Sweden, and the UK), this edited volume explores the progress of preschool children learning English over a period of two years. In the first volume, children's lexical and grammatical comprehension, the quality of L2 input, the effect of immersion on L1 developmen...

Drawing on data from eleven preschools in four European countries (Germany, Belgium, Sweden, and the UK), this edited volume explores the progress of preschool children learning English over a period of two years. The second edited volume gives details on best practices in bilingual preschools as well as background and training on topics such as se...

Contents Part A: BACKGROUND FOR IMMERSION 1. Preface 2. Why Multilingualism? 3. The Concept of Immersion 3.1 Selection of language and quantity of foreign language input 3.2 Prior knowledge from preschool 3.3 What distinguishes bilingual preschools from bilingual primary schools? 3.4 Selection of subjects 3.5 Literacy training 3.6 Didactic-methodol...

This longitudinal study focuses on German (GE) preschoolers' comprehension of English (EN) grammatical structures, who were tested in a two-choice picture selection task. Its aim is to examine how these EN grammatical structures develop during a three year period in a bilingual GE-EN preschool, outside of which the children's ambient language is no...

This study examined whether and how cross-language perception of vowels is affected by the consonantal context in which vowels occur. Native Danish (DK) listeners identified the 11 monophthongs of Southern British English (SBE), produced in three consonantal contexts (/hVt/, /dVt/, /gVk/), using DK response categories, and the listeners provided go...

Few studies have examined the production of English vowels by native speakers of languages with vowel inventories as large as, or larger than, English. Danish is such a language, whose vowels are unevenly distributed in the vowel space, with a densely populated upper portion and a sparsely populated lower portion of the vowel space. This paper repo...