In Germany, the number of primary schools offering bilingual programs is steadily increasing (fmks, 2014). Although the effectiveness of such programs has been demonstrated in many studies involving majority language students (e.g., Wesche, 2002), little is still known about minority language children who speak additional language/s at home and for whom, in our case, German constitutes their L2 and English their L3. In this study we compare 20 majority and 20 minority language students' German and English scores in receptive grammar tests at the end of grade 3 in a partial immersion school in which all subjects (except for German) are taught in English, corresponding to 70% of the teaching time.
We employed two picture interpretation tasks, namely the English Test for the Reception of Grammar (TROG-E, Bishop, 2003) and the adapted version for German, i.e. the Test zur Überprüfung des Grammatikverständnisses (TROG-G, Fox, 2006). 80/84 points, respectively, can maximally be scored in the TROG-E and the TROG-G, which comprise of 20/24 grammatical phenomena. In both paper-and-pencil versions, the children have to match a prompt to one of four different pictures.
Background variables included the Standard Progressive Matrices (Raven, 1976) for general cognitive ability, and a parental questionnaire to elicit information on children's language and social background.
The results do not show any significant group differences between majority and minority language children, neither for the TROG-E, nor for the TROG-G. In other words, minority language children performed equally well as majority language children, independent of the language being tested. For majority language children, the results for the TROG-E support the Full Transfer position (e.g., Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996), which holds that the learner's L1 grammar (in this case German) as a whole constitutes the L2 initial state. Interestingly, the same result applies to minority language children, suggesting that Full Transfer may also take place from L2 German as the dominant language to L3 English.
The finding that majority and minority language children perform in a very similar way in the two grammar tests lends further support to the assumption that immersion programs in primary schools may be beneficial for different groups of children including minority language children who, for different reasons, may be disadvantaged in regular school settings (see e.g. Steinlen, 2021).
References:
Bishop, D. V. M. (2003). Test for Reception of Grammar: TROG-2: Manual (Version 2). London: Pearson.
fmks (2014). Ranking: bilinguale Kitas und Grundschulen im Bundesvergleich, http://www.fmks-online.de/download.html.
Fox, A. (Ed). (2006). Trog-D. Idstein: Schulz-Kirchner.
Raven, J.C., Bulheller, S. & Häcker, H. (2002). CPM. Coloured Progressive Matrices. 3rd Ed. Göttingen: Hogrefe.
Schwartz, B.D., & Sprouse, R.A. (1996). L2 cognitive states and the Full Transfer/Full Access model. Second Language Research 12, 40-72.
Steinlen, A.(2021). English in Elementary School. Tübingen: Narr.
Wesche, M.B. (2002). Early French immersion: How has the original Canadian model stood the test of time? In P. Burmeister, T. Piske & A. Rohde (Ed.). An Integrated View of Language Development (pp. 357-379). Trier: WVT
