Crossing the bridge to literacy in foreign languages: C-test as a measure of language development

Abstract

Throughout an educational career, literacy skills become more elaborated. However, little is known about the development of reading and writing skills in foreign languages in adolescents. In this contribution, we focused on the development of language skills in the foreign languages English and French in Germany as measured by a C-Test. Hereby, we aimed to explore the potential of C-tests to provide a differentiated approach to the assessment of foreign language development in secondary school students. We draw on the data from the German panel study “Multilingual Development: a Longitudinal Perspective” (MEZ) on students’ language skills in the foreign languages English (n = 1987) and French (n = 662). We investigated the differences in the means of “classical” and “word recognition” scores in English and French C-tests and the development of these differences. The application of both scores in our study provided differentiated information on students’ receptive and productive aspects of literacy in adolescents and showed that students in secondary school are still on their way of developing spelling skills in both foreign languages. Furthermore, our results reveal that the receptive and productive components of language proficiency show different developmental patterns at various stages of foreign language learning.

Facing academic problems: Longitudinal relations between parental involvement and student academic achievement from a self‐determination perspective

“…To control for cognitive ability, a verbal subscale (V1; 30 tasks for verbal analogies) and a nonverbal subscale (N2; 25 tasks for figural analogies in geometric figures) of a cognitive ability test for 4–12th graders (KFT 4–12+ R; Heller & Perleth, 2000) were used at T1. Both subscales have shown high test reliability and validity in previous studies (e.g., Gogolin et al, 2021). Participants solved as many tasks as possible within 7.5 min for both subscales.…”

Approaching the Concept of Multiliteracies: Multilingual Writing Competence as an Integrated Model

“…In second-generation immigrant students, multilingual repertoires may comprise the majority language (ML), heritage languages (HLs), and foreign languages (FLs). Literacy skills in the multilingual repertoires referred to as multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996), may vary among the languages within and between individuals (Gogolin et al, 2021;Usanova & Schnoor, 2021a). While learning the ML and FL takes place at schools, only limited learning opportunities are available for the heritage languages that primarily affect the development of literacy skills in these languages (Brehmer & Mehlhorn, 2018;Kubota & Bale, 2020;Payant & Galante, 2022).…”