Exploring syntactic structures in first-language education: effects on literacy-related achievements

Abstract

A quasi-experimental study with 256 German sixth-grade students examined the effects of exploring syntactic structures on literacy-related achievements. The core feature of the instruction was that students had the opportunity to deal with syntactic structures directly, not mediated by analytic operations. Instruction covered six lessons targeting two types of syntactic contrasts (syntactic category contrasts, noun case contrasts). The results indicate that students profited from the instruction in their ability to use a marker of syntactic structure in written German, the capitalization of nouns. As to the ability to use the same marker to interpret text read, students of different achievement levels seem to have been differently affected. No effects were found for reading comprehension in general and spelling at the word level. The findings suggest that students' recognition of syntactic categories was enhanced even in contexts other than those they were familiarized within the instruction. However, it was not enhanced when they worked on a task that was completely new to them.

Working on grammar at school: Empirical research from German-speaking regions

“…Döhmann (1977) found that the adult students in her intervention groups improved in punctuation as well as in orthographically marking a grammatical morpheme (conjunction dass 'that' versus relative pronoun das 'that'). In the Funke et al (2013) study, grade 6 experimental students made significantly greater gains than the control students in capitalization, with experimental students improving evenly regardless of their starting conditions. No significant difference was found in general spelling.…”

“…The latter have tended to take for granted that because grammar knowledge underlies skillful writing (Heringer, 2000;Hoffmann, 2000) and appropriate reading comprehension (Glinz, 1993;Heringer, 2001), grammar instruction will automatically foster both. In the present chapter, consideration will be given first to studies on the impact of grammar instruction on writing (Klotz, 1996;Scholz, 1975) and to studies on reading (Blatt, Müller & Voss, 2010;Funke, Wieland, Schönenberg & Melzer, 2013;Hohm, 2007;Szubert, 2015; see also Herrmann, 1974;Döhmann, 1977). Subsequently, some findings about the effects of grammar instruction on spelling and punctuation will be compiled.…”

“…In a comment, the authors point out that the quality of the tutoring delivered by the preservice teachers seems to have varied to a high degree. Funke et al (2013;cf. Melzer, 2011) implemented an instructional program including four lessons in grade 6 classes.…”

“…Table 2 summarizes the results of studies on the impact of grammar instruction on linguistic skills based on the same methodology as described in 3.1. At variance with the general procedure (see comment on Table 1), the effect size for the Funke et al 2013 study was calculated using the odds ratio formula because scores were obviously not normally distributed in this study. Recall that the statistical power to detect heterogeneity is very limited in these cases.…”

The impact of syntactic and lexical trainings on capitalization of nouns in German in grade five

“…The writer cannot rely on phoneme-grapheme correspondences and needs to consider the syntactic structure in order to mark the syntactic information. To achieve this task, teaching these syntactic markers by focusing on the underlying syntactic structures has found to be beneficial for children's spelling progress in English (Bryant & Nunes, 2003), French (Bîlici, Ugen, Fayol, & Weth, 2018;Totereau et al, 2013) and German (Funke, Wieland, Schönenberg, & Melzer, 2013;Wahl, Rautenberg, & Helms, 2017). However, the syntactic approach derived from this insight has not TRAINING A SYNTACTIC MARKER 3 found wide-spread use in regular classroom teaching in German-speaking countries.…”