Teaching of capitalization in German in secondary school

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Iris Rautenberg; Dr. Stefan Wahl
• Subject Area: General and Domain-Specific Teaching and Learning ; General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 451577334

Poor spelling skills affect many German students. Capitalization within a sentence is particularly challenging in German orthography, even for learners beyond the second grade. Traditionally, capitalization is taught from the beginning of primary school. There the upper case is directly linked to the semantic properties of the lexical category “substantive”. This predominantly lexical teaching approach is often criticized as one reason for the students’ orthographic failure. Alternative, syntactic approaches abandon the link between capitalization and lexical class and assert the rule for upper case is motivated syntactically instead: According to Maas (1992), the head of a noun phrase is written with a capital; according to Funke (2017) “syntactic nouns” are marked in this way. In Röber-Siekmeyers’ (1999) didactic implementation of the syntactic approach, pupils learn to apply explicit rules for identifying the head of a noun phrase. Alternatively, there are “implicit” learning settings: in Melzer’s (2011) (following Funke, 2005) didactic approach, students explore syntactic structures on literacy-related achievements in an “implicit” way.Intervention studies have shown that fifth grade Luxembourg students learning German as a foreign language, and German second grade students, benefit from a syntactical approach (according to Röber-Siekmeyer) and improved their spelling performance in capitalizations (Brucher et al., 2020, Wahl et al., 2017). However, difficulties arose from the students’ (lexical) preconceptions on capitalizations, which make a so-called conceptual change necessary. It is still unclear if a syntactic approach to capitalization can be effective in German second grade students, if the conceptual change is facilitated by explicit refutation, and how implicit learning affects spelling performance of capitalizations. The aim of the planned pre-post-follow-up-intervention study is the evaluation of four didactic approaches (online-tutorials) in sixth and ninth classes (N=600) and their impact on the students’ productive and receptive capitalization competency . Approach (1) is syntactical training as per Röber-Siekmeyer, (2) additional explicit refutation of the students’ lexical pre-concepts on capitalization prior to the syntactical training, (3) an implicit learning environment aligned to Melzer (2011) and Funke (2005), and (4) standard lexical training. In preparation for the intervention study the following steps are conducted: (a) methodic and didactic design as well as technical preparation of the learning tutorials, (b) a preliminary study to find out which linguistic parameters have an impact on an item’s level of difficulty with respect to capitalization. (c) Development of a spelling test to evaluate capitalization skills. The results of the intervention study will be incorporated into a capitalization-online-tutorial and a screening test for capitalization skills for practical application in secondary schools.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants