Transfer project T4: Research based support of the complementary Spanish school in Germany (FUSED)

Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Conxita Lleó

The transfer project T4 has as its point of departure certain findings on incomplete phono-prosodic, lexical and orthographic knowledge emerging in the acquisition of the Spanish language by bilingual children living in a German speaking environment. The project has as its main purpose to quantify these results and to operationalize them through the Counselor for Education and the Education Department of the Spanish Embassy. These findings should thus be converted into language assistance measures (resources for the classroom), to support the work of the Spanish teachers of the Programs A.L.C.E. and M.E.U. of the complementary teaching of Spanish.

The Project E3 of the SFB 538 has arrived at basic linguistic results, which indicate that the Spanish language of these bilingual children is influenced by German and that in many areas the development of the spoken Spanish of these children is delayed in comparison to the development of German. The acquisition of written Spanish often involves specific difficulties, too, as it is based on an incomplete and unsure phonological basis of the Spanish language and its alphabetization takes place once the German alphabetization has been enforced. In the transfer project these findings are operationalized and applied to support the Spanish complementary school, i.e., they will be converted into evaluation exercises and to means of assisting the Spanish classroom. The Spanish Embassy offers meetings, workshops, conferences and courses for the implementation of the project and contributes to the production of auxiliary means and materials for the assistance and promotion of the complementary teaching of Spanish.