Zweisprachiges Lesen im Grundschulalter

The present study deals with the question of how bilingualism in children who grow up simultaneously bilingual affects their reading competence, or from a speech science perspective, their ability to read for meaning. To this end, the foundations of the topic of bilingualism are first presented. Additionally, factors that can influence bilingual upbringing are mentioned. Furthermore, the extent to which the literature has so far addressed the issue of simultaneous bilingualism in school-age children is discussed. It is shown that children who grow up simultaneously bilingual generally exhibit vocabulary gaps as well as uncertainties and errors in grammar.

Subsequently, the state of the literature on reading competence is examined, both from the perspective of speech science and from the perspective of bilingualism research. The speech scientific thesis that reading aloud promotes text comprehension is taken up. In the literature on bilingualism, it is assumed that reading skills in one language can be effortlessly transferred to the other. Nevertheless, it is shown that children who grow up successively bilingual generally read more slowly than monolingual children and have greater difficulties understanding a text.

In the subsequent empirical part, seven Norwegian-German children are examined, each of whom reads a German and a Norwegian text aloud and then answers comprehension questions about them. Both the reading performance and the ability to adequately respond to the comprehension questions are compared with a respective monolingual control group. Additionally, it is investigated whether the children exhibit qualitative differences in reading aloud and text comprehension in their two first languages.