Sub study of Linguistic Features for the MEZ-Project
3 July 2017, by UHH/Gogolin
Within the scope of the research project “Multilingual Development: A longitudinal Perspective” a partial survey was carried out in collaboration with IEA Hamburg. More than 200 pupils from 16 schools in 14 German cities took part. Many thanks to everyone who was involved in conducting this study; most of all to the participants but we also appreciate the vital support from parents and teachers very much.
Participants were not only tested in their writing abilities concerning grammatical phenomena, as for example word order, the study aimed especially at gathering spoken data. The oral performances in German and the heritage languages Turkish and Russian, as well as in the foreign languages English, French and Russian were assessed.
This part of the study comprised diverse tasks: Students were asked to read out specific sentences and a short coherent text, to name objects that were shown to them, and to describe a picture story in their own words. In addition, they gave an interview in which they answered questions about their linguistic profiles. The design of the assignments were similar to ensure comparability and to get an overview of the full potential in the individual languages.This allows pointing out the specific linguistic areas in which bilinguals have advantages and disadvantages when learning an additional language. The next step is to work out recommendations as to how students with multilingual background can be supported in foreign language classrooms and how teaching and learning might be improved by keeping their abilities in mind.