Phontasia: A phonics game for German and its effect on orthographic skills–first corpus explorations

Abstract

This paper reports on first results in a study on orthography acquisition for children in German elementary school. One major aspect of German orthography concerns the marking of vowel duration, which occurs in every regular word in German. Therefore, mastery of this pattern has a large impact both on accurate spelling and very likely on reading ability. However, data shows that acquisition of this sub-skill appears difficult for kids to master, even beyond elementary school. In this paper, we explore a corpus of freely written text data that was collected on a weekly basis across several third grade classes in three different schools over a period of three months. Two of the schools participated in an intervention (iPad Phonics Game for German, called Phontasia). Studying the impact of the game on skill acquisition proved difficult because the ability to employ iPads in the classroom was correlated with socio-economic status of the schools. Results from VERA, a German standardized test, were obtained for several classes, allowing us to add one control group to the study. Preliminary results indicate that Phontasia intervention is worth pursuing in future studies to improve orthographic skills.

German phonics game using speech synthesis – a longitudinal study about the effect on orthography skills

“…In our study we are bound only by the German language itself. The work described here continues the previously published case study [22] and extends the evaluation to a set of 16 children over a 12 week period comparing their performance over time with themselves as well as with their classmates before and after the study took place. The combination of speech synthesis and game play define the central aspect of the proposed acquisition of orthography in this study.…”

Grundlagen der sprachlichen Bildung

“…Im Bereich des Makro-Scaffolding gibt es eine große Bandbreite digitaler Angebote. Diese reichen von spielbasierten Interventionen, wie Phontasia (Berkling, 2017) und Prosodyia (Holz, 2020) für den Lese-Rechtschreib-Erwerb, über Ansätze zum angereicherten (cabuu-App 6 ) oder aufgabenspezifischen Erwerb von Vokabeln (Ponnusamy & Meurers, 2021), bis zu Systemen, die Lehrkräfte bei der Auswahl oder Erstellung von Unterrichtsmaterial unterstützen. Letztere konzentrieren sich u. a. darauf, entwicklungsproximale sprachliche Konstruktionen möglichst frequent im Material vorkommen zu lassen (input enrichment; oder durch visuelle Hervorhebungen salienter zu machen (visual input enhancement;Sharwood Smith, 1993), basierend auf der Erkenntnis, dass der Zweitspracherwerb eine bewusste Wahrnehmung von Sprache erfordert (noticing hypothesis; Schmidt, 1990).…”

How to train your syllable stress awareness - A digital game-based intervention for German dyslexic children

“…Kieler Leseaufbau [37] Flüssig lesen lernen [36] PHONIT [43] Lautgetreue Lese-Rechtschreibförderung [38] Marburger Rechtschreibtraining [39] Lautarium [10] Morpheus [9] 'Lernspiele mit Elfe und Mathis' [12] Phontasia [15] Meister Cody -Namagi [44] Prosodiya [45] Focus Second, if designed properly, learners can use CBIs autonomously for homework complementary to school and learning therapy without a real tutor. In fact, dyslexic children may respond to explicit computer instructions in writing as well as they have with human teachers [46].…”

“…This way, misspellings and correct spellings can be made audible for each of the children's solutions and children may reflect on their answer. Preliminary results of two evaluations indicate that Phontasia has positive effects on the spelling of consonant doublings and the German vowel doubling ie [15,67].…”