Ignorieren Grundschulkinder Konnektoren? — Untersuchung einer bildungssprachlichen Komponente

Comprehension of Connectives: Development Across Primary School Age and Influencing Factors

“…In our study, we traced the development of the comprehension of connectives across primary school age with a newly developed and validated test instrument. Our results show that the comprehension of connectives increases from Grade 2 to Grade 4, supporting previous studies which found the comprehension of connectives to still improve after children have entered school (e.g., Dragon et al, 2015;Knoepke et al, 2017). With respect to socioeconomic and language background, we find an effect of SES on the intercept as well as on the growth of comprehension of connectives across primary school; further, language minority learners showed less proficiency in Grade 2 but comparable growth rates to monolingual German students.…”

“…In particular, research findings indicate that students in primary school still show pronounced restrictions in processing negative-causal connectives. Dragon et al (2015) found German students in Grades 2 and 3 to hardly process connectives in negative-causal sentence pairs (connected, e.g., by although, despite) compared to their comprehension of positive-causal sentence pairs (connected, e.g., by therefore, thus). When confronted with a task to indicate whether sentence pairs made sense, primary school students systematically rejected negative-causal sentence pairs that were semantically coherent due to the connective and accepted negative-causal sentence pairs that were incoherent due to the connective.…”

“…When confronted with a task to indicate whether sentence pairs made sense, primary school students systematically rejected negative-causal sentence pairs that were semantically coherent due to the connective and accepted negative-causal sentence pairs that were incoherent due to the connective. Dragon et al (2015) suggested that most primary school students ignored the negative-causal connectives and made judgments of the sentence pairs only based on the semantic scenario and situational compatibility, while ignoring the meaning of the connectives. In a similar vein, drawing on a sample of primary school students in Grades 1-4, Knoepke et al (2017) showed that students' comprehension of negative-causal coherence relations develops through primary school age.…”

“…To sum up, to date and despite their suggested and crosssectionally demonstrated importance, only a small number of studies addressed the comprehension of connectives in primary school age (e.g., Droop and Verhoeven, 2003;Dragon et al, 2015;Knoepke et al, 2017) and traced their developmental progress across grades. Furthermore, although some studies which compared the comprehension of connectives in monolinguals and language minority students suggest that connectives are particularly challenging for language minority students in the primary and middle school grades (e.g., McClure and Steffensen, 1985;Verhoeven, 2000;Droop and Verhoeven, 2003;Crosson et al, 2008), these studies mainly included language minority students from low-SES families (e.g., Droop and Verhoeven, 2003;Crosson and Lesaux, 2013b).…”

The role of knowledge of connectives in comprehension of a German narrative text

“…Geva and Ryan (1985) showed that English speaking students from Grades 5 and 7 benefitted from connectives with regard to text comprehension to the greatest extent when the connectives were highlighted, that is, students often simply seem to read over connectives without noticing them. Similarly, Dragon, Berendes, Weinert, Heppt, and Stanat (2015) concluded that German primary school children often overlook these, too. Making students aware of connectives seems to be particularly relevant to bilingual students at least in English and German speaking contexts.…”