English in Elementary Schools. Anja Steinlen
how to teach reading and writing; and they neither offer any literacy methodology based on any learning theory, nor any systematic strategies for reading and writing, which may support teaching and learning. Although certain levels of competence should be reached at the end of grade 4 (namely A1), textbooks do not provide sufficient guidelines as to how this goal could be reached, particularly with respect to the heterogeneous FL level in class. According to Burwitz-Melzer (2010) there is still considerable room for improvement regarding literacy instruction in English textbooks and in the respective guidelines for teachers of English as a subject.
2.2.4 Studies on FL reading in regular EFL programs
In empirical research, an increasing number of studies have examined the influence of written language on foreign language learning in elementary schools in Germany, but the focus has been more on reading (comprehension) than on writing. These studies have been largely conducted in only one Federal State of Germany (e.g., EVENING for Nordrhine-Westfalia, or Rymarczyk, 2011; Steinlen & Piske, 2018 for Baden-Württemberg), with the exception of the BIG-Kreis (2015), which assessed students’ FL competence in different Federal States. Unfortunately, many findings were not related to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR, Council of Europe, 2001, 2018) and/or statistically analysed.
The EVENING study (Evaluation Englisch in der Grundschule) was conducted with around 1,300 fourth grade classes in Nordrhine-Westfalia (NRW, Engel, Groot-Wilken & Thürmann, 2009), who had attended regular FL lessons since the beginning of grade 3. The reading test consisted of 25 multiple-choice and matching tasks, which were specifically designed for the project, and assessed reading skills with regard to the children’s world knowledge, lexical knowledge and knowledge of chunks and phrasal verbs. In total, the children solved 66.8% of all tasks. These results were better than expected, because English in its written form had only played a subordinate role in the curriculum in NRW at that time (2005-2007). This was also reflected in the low amount of reading activities carried out in the 88 hours of EFL lessons (Wilden et al., 2013).
Elementary schoolers’ English skills in reading, writing, listening, and speaking were evaluated in the BIG-study with a sample of 2,148 fourth grade students from different Federal States of Germany (BIG-Kreis, 2015), using test material from the EVENING study. The 17 items on English reading comprehension included multiple choice tasks and tasks on reordering sentences to match pictures. On average, students answered 14 items correctly, corresponding to 82.4%. However, the authors pointed out that the tasks may have been too easy, because the fourth graders in the BIG-study obtained scores on the reading comprehension tasks that were more than 15% higher than those scores reported in the EVENING study (Engel et al., 2009).
Smaller-scale studies on English reading skills in regular English classrooms in Germany include Rymarczyk (2011) and Steinlen & Piske (2018a). Rymarczyk (2011) examined English reading comprehension skills of 48 first- and third-graders in the FL classroom, reporting that even weaker learners, when confronted with English writing in the classroom, showed significant learning gains in reading. Due to the incongruent phoneme-grapheme relationship in English, the children in Rymarczyk’s study achieved better results on the silent-reading, word-picture matching task than on the reading-aloud task. Based on these results, Rymarczyk (2011) argued for the inclusion of written language in the first two elementary school years, as doing so may also present additional learning opportunities for weaker students (see also Wilden et al., 2013 and chapter 7.1).
Steinlen & Piske (2018a) examined English reading comprehension skills of 73 students at the end of grade 4 who had attended a FL program since first grade. Using the subtests for reading from the Primary School Assessment Kit (PSAK, Little, Simpson & Catibusic, 2003), they found these children to perform in-between levels A1 and A2 regarding their English reading comprehension skills. Thus, the outcome for English reading exceeded the target level of A1 (KMK, 2013a). The authors argued that these results were possibly due to two factors. Apart from the children’s background (i.e., having age-appropriate cognitive abilities and coming from middle-class families), the high quality of the English lessons in the FL program may have been the decisive factor, since the teachers in the FL program hold university degrees in teaching English-as-a-subject rather than teaching “fachfremd” (i.e., without any qualification for this subject which may negatively affect students’ performance, see also Fleckenstein et al., 2020).
2.2.5 Studies on FL writing in regular EFL programs
As previously noted, only few studies have examined students’ English text production in the elementary school context in Germany: for example, the BIG-study (BIG-Kreis, 2015) also tested the 2,148 fourth graders on their English writing skills using tasks particularly designed for this study. The four writing tasks included copying words, writing single words to label pictures and filling out a gap text with English words and sentences where the children provided information about themselves. As expected, the children’s scores related to matching and copying single words and providing an English word to label a picture were highest; and between 54% to 71% of these tasks were solved accurately (or comprehensibly). Half of the children managed to provide adequate information in the gap text (the so-called “semi-creative task”) despite the fact that text production is usually not trained in the FL elementary school classroom. Errors in these gap texts pertained to the omission of words, incorrect plural endings or subject-verb agreement. Common misspellings in all tasks included the words <pencil> and <cheese>, which were words that the teachers had used in listening and speaking but not in writing activities. Omissions were noted for the words <bathroom, underground, scarf, Wednesday> as *<bathoom, undeground, scaf>; and transpositions for the words <white, blue, clothes, shoes> as *<wihte, bleu, colthes, shoes>. The authors concluded that the children form hypotheses and construct rules with reference to existing experience and knowledge, many based on German, as in *<shört, jelo, Freidi> instead of <shirt, yellow, Friday>. In sum, students’ English writing skills were of much lower quality than their reading skills. This may be attributable to the fact that, according to teacher interviews, writing activities were carried out only in half of their classes on a regular basis, and that almost 20% of the teachers never let their students write in English.
Steinlen & Piske (2018a) also examined English writing skills of the 73 fourth graders in the FL program. The results of the subtest for reading (PSAK, Little, Simpson & Catibusic, 2003) showed that these children generally performed at level A1 with respect to their English writing skills. This outcome is in line with the expectations by the Ministerium Baden-Württemberg für Kultus, Jugend und Sport (2004, 2016a).
As this short literature review has shown, there is a need to examine the development of FL literacy skills in regular programs, in particular because the Federal States Baden-Württemberg and North Rhine-Westfalia have recently decided to postpone the beginning of FL classes from grade 1 to grade 3 (e.g., Ministerium Baden-Württemberg für Kultus, Jugend und Sport, 2020). There have been two main reasons for this decision. First, a growing number of elementary school children show deficits in German reading, writing and arithmetic on various achievement tests. It is argued that by delaying the FL lessons, the schools gain two lessons per class level which they can use to better support these students. Second, some recent studies have indicated that in the long run (e.g., in grade 7 or 9), younger learners who started English-as-a-subject in grade 1 showed neither medium- nor long-term benefits over older learners who started in grade 3. As Fleckenstein et al. (2020) pointed out in their review, such results may also be due to the quality of FL teaching in elementary schools (with the current focus on implicit learning and not on FL literacy input); the CEFR level A1 being too low a goal; and the transition to secondary education having a strong focus on explicit learning, deductive teaching of vocabulary, grammar and metalinguistic abilities, as well as on a greater number of assessments of FL reading and writing skills. This is also one of the reasons why, in all of the studies reviewed above, the authors concluded that it is overdue to introduce systematic literacy instruction in the regular FL classroom in Germany (including, for example, an approach to teach English spelling, see also e.g., Börner et al., 2017; Burwitz-Melzer, 2010; Hempel et al., 2018). With such standards, more teachers would hopefully feel obliged to offer writing activities, which in turn would also give them more