Bilingual Development in Primary School Age

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Hans H. Reich
Most longitudinal studies of children’s bilingual development describe or analyze the individual language
developments of children of middle-class background, typically in a situation in which one parent
consciously speaks one language to the child and the other parent, the other language, from birth onward
(Tracy/Gawlitzek-Maiwald 2000). But this way of growing up bilingually is hardly the only, nor the
average situation. The linguistic background of children in immigrant families in Germany presents itself
in a quite different light. It is characterized by the usage of the family’s native language as the one spoken
predominantly in the household and varying usage of the German language spoken outside the family
circle. There are some empirical studies of the bilingualism of this population (e.g. Hepsöyler/Liebe-
Harkort 1988, 1991; Preibusch 1992; Pfaff 1991; Gogolin/Neumann 1997; Jeuk 2003). But longitudinal
research has been scarce up to now. The following contribution attempts to fill this gap to some degree. It
presents the results from a research project about Turkish-German children aged 5-10 years during their
primary school years in the city-state of Hamburg. This research was part of a project which aimed at the
development of measures for bilingual proficiency levels and, later on, of language support programmes
for this group of children (Reich 2004a). It describes very briefly the data collection and the analysis
procedure (for more details see Reich 2004b) and then presents some results with regard to the changing
relationship between first and second language in grades 1, 2, and 3.
I. Sample and Data Collection
The research involved about 150 children enrolled at 7 primary schools with different percentages of
pupils of migrant background. Most of them are born in Germany; all of them have some contact with
German, however modest in some cases. Turkish prevails as the language of family communication; in
one third of the cases both the parents speak only Turkish to their children. In 5 families Kurdish or
Arabic is used alongside Turkish and German with the children. The children attended different classes,
had different teachers and different time tables. Beyond their age and bilingualism, only one common
additional feature is to be stressed here, namely, that in all the participating schools at least one Turkish
teacher was present so that all children in the sample had some access to Turkish lessons, however widely
varying, from class to class and from grade to grade.

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One major question for this group was how the language proficiency improved during the time of
observation and whether the first and the second language of the pupils were developing in similar or
rather different ways. Consequently, when deciding which measurement instruments would be
appropriate for our study, the following had to be taken into consideration (1) the necessity to provide for
data measuring the children’s progress in each language and (2) to allow for a direct comparison between
the two languages of the children. Given the children’s age, we opted for a profile analysis of oral texts as
the best way to appropriately assess their competencies in both German and Turkish. Around the time of
enrolment, around 6 months before school begins, the children were given a picture showing a kitchen
scene and a picture story about a cat hunting a bird and the bird’s triumphant escape. They were asked to
talk about the picture both in German with a German teacher and – at another point of time – in Turkish
with a Turkish teacher. The order in which either language was to be used was left free for the teachers to
decide. The utterances of both children and teachers were recorded on tape. This procedure was repeated
a year later, towards the end of grade 1, with the same instruments and most of the same children. In
order to keep the children motivated to participate, we opted not to repeat the task of explaining the
“Kitchen Scene” and the story “Cat and Bird” a second time. In grade 3 they were shown a short video
cartoon, “The Mole and his Friends”, and asked to tell what they had seen. As this is not the same task as
describing the “Kitchen scene” and the picture story “Cat and Bird”, comparability in time between
results of the latter with the previous tests, i.e. the ability to measure children’s progress from grade 1 to
grade 3, was reduced to a considerable degree. It remains, however, possible to analyse the relationship of
L1 and L2 at this point of their school career and to ask what changes had come about since the end of
grade 1.
II. Measures of Bilingualism
For direct comparison of L1 and L2 we decided to use a measure for descriptive and narrative
competence. The visual stimuli were divided into elementary parts, it was decided which actors and
events were to be mentioned in minimal (understandable) propositions, and university collaborators rated
the utterances of the children accordingly. Interraterreliability was calculated and found to be satisfying.
In addition, as a measure of the size of the child’s vocabulary, the verbal types (i.e. different verbs used
by the children) were counted. As indicators of grammatical development we analysed the positions of
verbs in German and the verbal tense suffixes in Turkish as well as the syntactical means of connecting
clauses in both the languages (for details see Reich 2004b). It should be noted that all the measures of
vocabulary and grammar are languagespecific and, consequently, cannot be directly compared.