Teaching of capitalization in German in secondary school
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Final Report Abstract
Sentence internal capitalization is one of the main sources of spelling errors among both students and adults, even though the rules of capitalization are a regular topic in elementary school spelling instruction. The lexical-semantic approach, according to which nouns are capitalized, dominates the classrooms. For example, students learn in second grade that "Namenwörter” (= ‘name words’) refer to people, animals, or objects and are capitalized. In contrast, alternative syntax-based approaches propose that the head of a noun phrase (e.g., das laute Singen, ‘the loud singing’) should be capitalized regardless of its word class affiliation. Furthermore, studies on implicit learning approaches suggest that engaging with syntactic structures in a contrastive manner can positively influence correct capitalization, even when explicit capitalization strategies are not addressed. Whether a syntax-based approach is effective at the secondary school level, how students in this age group can best transition from word-class-based to syntactic learning, and what effects implicit learning conditions have, were examined in the project "Kompetenzentwicklung Großschreibung in der Sekundarstufe" (KeGS) ["Competence Development in Capitalization in Secondary School"] through a pre-post-follow-up intervention study in the 7th grade. The intervention was implemented through digital learning modules over six instructional sessions. The study investigated the differential effectiveness of four didactic approaches on students’ productive and receptive capitalization competencies. Overall, the KeGS study demonstrated the effectiveness of syntax-based instruction for improving sentence internal capitalization among 7th-grade students. Among other findings, students’ performance improved significantly from the pretest to the posttest in all groups. Overall, students in the intervention groups were able to enhance their capitalization skills to the same extent as students in the control group. In terms of syntactic reading, the "implicit" learning group showed significantly greater gains than the word-class-based group, which performed the weakest in this area.
