Kurzfassung

The number of bilingual kindergartens in Germany has more than tripled over the past fifteen years (FMKS 2014) and it is still increasing. There is growing consensus on the positive effects of bilingual education programmes for young learners regarding the development of their cognitive and social skills. Yet, only a few studies (see Steinlen & Piske 2016 for an overview) have so far focused on the linguistic knowledge of English that the children acquire in a German-English bilingual...The number of bilingual kindergartens in Germany has more than tripled over the past fifteen years (FMKS 2014) and it is still increasing. There is growing consensus on the positive effects of bilingual education programmes for young learners regarding the development of their cognitive and social skills. Yet, only a few studies (see Steinlen & Piske 2016 for an overview) have so far focused on the linguistic knowledge of English that the children acquire in a German-English bilingual kindergarten programme.
This study aims to address this gap by investigating the English grammatical knowledge of six German L1 children (three girls and three boys) during their time in a German-English immersion kindergarten. Two sets of data were analysed and compared to each other to examine the syntactic and morphological knowledge of the children six months before they transferred to primary school. The first data set comes from the ELCOBiK-2 observation scheme (Townsend, 2013), which is based on the kindergarten teachers’ observations and assessment of the respective children’s linguistic knowledge. The second data set comprises data obtained from a picture description task that was analysed with the help of the developmental hierarchy proposed by Processability Theory (Pienemann 2005).
The findings of the study provide insights into the implicit linguistic knowledge of English, which German L1 children acquire during their time in a bilingual kindergarten programme and its implications for the transition to primary school. Furthermore, the results reveal whether an extensive and time-consuming distributional analysis of the children’s language is necessary to determine their stage of development or if an assessment by the kindergarten teachers based on their observations is actually sufficient.
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