Systematic Acquisition of Reading and Writing: An Exploration ofStructure in Didactic Elementary Texts for German

Kay Berkling, Rémi LavalleyCooperative State University

Karlsruhe, GermanyremiL@singularity.fr

berkling@dhbw-karlsruhe.de

Uwe ReichelInstitute of Phonetics and Speech Processing

University of Munich, Germanyreichelu@phonetik.uni-muenchen.de

Abstract

The work presented here is part of a largerstudy that looks at the impact that struc-tured teaching materials have on improv-ing orthographic skills. The first step isan analysis of the current status of linguis-tic structures in common primary read-ers (primers) since their key purpose is tolead children along a systematic learningpath towards becoming proficient readersand writers. Using text processing toolsdetecting morphemes, syllables and sen-tence structures, several popular primersare automatically examined with respectto their systematic approach to languageat the phonics/syllable, word and sentencelevels. It can be shown that there is littleapparent structure in today’s school textsat any of the examined levels when com-pared to some older schoolbooks (1877,1904) that have a systematic and explicitprogression at all examined levels.

1 Introduction

Over the last decade the number of children inGermany referred to language pathologists (Lo-gopädie) has increased manifold according toWiDO AOK (health insurance) (2012; 2013)to reach an all-time high of 25% for boys agedaround six. The cause for this phenomenon hasnot been well studied. Our hypothesis is thatan improved structure in learning materials atthe word and sentence level may improve ortho-graphic skills. As a first step towards answer-ing this question, this paper looks at the givenstructure in popular first grade readers (primers).To study the actual impact of structure on per-formance is beyond the scope of this paper buthas been covered in part by other publications inthis series of work (Berkling and Pflaumer, 2014;

Berkling et al., 2015). This line of research is fur-ther motivated by results stemming from a large-scale analysis of orthographic skills in a corpusfrom first grade until eighth grade. In order to un-derstand why certain spelling errors persist, moreanalysis is clearly needed to show the impact ofteaching methods on acquisition of orthography.

Much work has been done in studying vari-ous approaches for English reading and writingacquisition. The National Reading Panel (Don-ald N. Langenberg et al, 2000) and more up-to-date studies by Galuschka (2014) have publishedmeta-reviews of major comparative and quantita-tive studies, realizing that phonics1 is a vital com-ponent in reading instruction. It has been shown inthe Anglophone research by Stahl (1989) that re-lying solely on the whole-word approach is to thedetriment of the weaker students. It has also beenshown by Steffler (2001) that making structure ex-plicit leads to efficient learning results. To ourknowledge, no comparative work has been doneon the German language. Phonics in its com-plexity is also not known as a method for read-ing/writing acquisition in Germany. In that sense,phonics is not apparent in the elementary readerswhile other methods prevail.

Currently, in Germany, there are mainly 2-3popular methods in use. One such method is called"Lautiermethode" and refers to the theory thatwords can be sounded out one letter at a time (Re-ichen, 2008; Brügelmann, 2014). By synthesiz-ing the sounds, the word is supposed to be read inits entirety. This works approximately for wordslike "Oma" or "Banane" that is an imported wordbut deemed "lautgetreu", meaning one graphemecorresponds to one phoneme. However, this ap-proach fails to generalize to typical German struc-tures in which a single grapheme <e> can stand

1The explicit and systematic (including clear sequenceand scope) instruction of patterns in phoneme-grapheme cor-respondence)

for at least three semantically distinct pronuncia-tions as a function of its position within syllableand word.

Another popular method says that reading ac-quisition takes place at the syllable level as this ismore natural for children to bridge from the spo-ken language to the written representation (Röber-Siekmeyer, 2004). However, if the syllables arenot taught well, then the learner pronounces theunstressed syllable in a stressed manner, therebynot recognizing the sound of the resulting word,for example by reading "Mutter" as /mUt.te:r/ in-stead of /mUt5/.

Finally, the whole word approach is widelyused, even if not explicitly stated. It assumes thatthe child, given enough practice, will memorizethe words as a unit. In general, experts say thatfirst grade learning and teaching is based on a mixof all these methods and their respective effective-ness is child dependent.

Primers (Fibel in German) for first grade tradi-tionally have the primary purpose of leading chil-dren in a systematic manner towards learning toread and write. As a first step towards understand-ing these methodologies and their progression, thegoal of this work is to analyze and document se-lected structures and their progression in primaryreaders. The analysis looks at the lexical levelthrough syllable and morpheme occurrence, wordstructures at the syllable level and complexity pro-gression at the sentence level. Texts are analyzedfor a number of books, including two older onesfrom 1877 and 1904 that show explicit structureunlike any of the ones used today.

The rest of the paper proceeds as follows. Sec-tion 2 motivates the proposed levels of analysis.After a brief overview of German phonics sys-tem and sentence complexity levels in Section 3,Section 4 will explain the tools used for analysis.Section 5 will introduce the data and Section 6 re-ports on the results, comparing the various differ-ent texts. Section 7 discusses the results.

2 Motivation

Elementary primers have traditionally had the pur-pose of serving as a guide for learners of a read-ing and writing system. In this function, theyshould naturally display a thought-out systematicapproach on how they move from simple towardsincreasingly complex materials, considering theproblem of inert knowledge (what children theo-

Figure 1: Index pages for a primer around 1900

retically know but are unable to use) which canbe reduced by usage in different contexts (Bereiterand Scardamalia, 1985).

When looking at old primers, this type of pro-gression is often made explicit within the indexor names of the chapters as shown in Figure 1.Today’s books do not explicitly have a progres-sion apart from the order of introduction of thegraphemes. The goal of the work presented here isto visualize and render explicit any inherent pro-gression that can be found at the syllable, mor-pheme or sentence structure level, keeping in mindthat a systematic approach, including explicitnessis important according to a study by Steffler (2001)to ensure the learners’ grasp of linguistic struc-tures. Finally, a look at progression should includea look at the complexity that can be reached.

It is well known, that learning builds on previ-ous knowledge and that each new material shouldhave small consecutive steps building on eachother (Martin and Rose, 2005; Leong, 1998). As aconsequence, complexity grows incrementally andbuilds on the knowledge of the preschooler, whichis mostly based on syllable structure of the lan-guage and progresses from there as described bySiekmeyer (2009).

For the German language, the most commonsyllabic pattern is the "Trochee" type of word

(2-syllable length, first syllable stressed, secondone unstressed). A comparable example for bothEnglish and German is the word "double" or"doppelt". The top 10,000 German words innewspapers include about 16% of pure 2-SyllableTrochees that follow this pattern. The 100 mostused words cover around 45% in a standard text.The rest of the words are constructed words, suchas compound words or those containing prefix orsuffix attached to words that contain the Trocheepattern, where students have to generalize the pat-tern to unseen words – these make up about 45%of the top 10,000 words according to an automatedanalysis by Berkling (2014).

The remaining words, like "Auto", "Banane","Tiger", "Portemonnaie" are imported vocabularyand follow different orthographic patterns that arenot directly comparable to German. This is whythe study of the Trochee is at the center of theword-pattern analysis.

Research questions to answer by analyzing thedata are therefore the following: 1) Are the pat-terns of the German language (in form of Trochee)occurring in some structured form? 2) Is thererepetition at syllable and morpheme level to sup-port the cognitive process by achieving automa-tion as described by McLaughlin (1990)? 3) Isthe vocabulary embedded within sentence struc-tures that exercise grammatical structures, includ-ing morpheme endings?

3 The Structure of German Text

In this section, the underlying theory concern-ing syllable types for the German language is ex-plained. The structures underlying the study ofword repetition and sentence complexity are alsothereby defined and motivated.

3.1 SyllablesThe German language distinguishes between threemajor classes of Trochee that will be describednext.

• Type 1: C-V-C-red ("b-e-t-en"): Thistype of Trochee is the simplest form(phonemes: Consonant-Vowel-Consonant-reduction), comparable in that sense to the"cat", "hat", "mat" vocabulary used in thefirst steps of English phonics lessons. The1-syllable form CVC derives directly fromthe 2-syllable Trochee ("gab" – as past tenseof "geben"). In this case, the morpheme

boundary is within the Trochee. CVCred cannot be reduced to a 1-syllable words whenthere is no morpheme boundary within theTrochee, examples are "bird" ("Vogel") or"vase" ("Vase"). Identifiable features of thisword type are the tense/long vowel (V) fol-lowed by a single consonant sound and a re-duction syllable that contains the letter <e>pronounced as schwa /@/.

• Type 2: C-v-C1-red ("B-e-tt-en"): Thesecond type of word is one of the mostdifficult features of the written language tomaster by learners of the orthographic sys-tem (phonemes: Consonant - short vowel -Consonant - reduction). It distinguishes it-self from the first type only by the featuretense/lax of the vowel, perceived as short-ness in this form. As in the first type, thereis only one consonant sound in the centerof the word. However, in the orthographythe tenseness of the preceding vowel is de-noted by duplicating the center consonant let-ter. Orthographically, there are regularitiessuch as <tt>, <nn> and irregularities suchas <ng>, <tz>, <ck>, or <sch> and <ch>that need to be mastered. The 1-syllable formCvC1 derives directly from the 2-syllableTrochee ("Betten" (plural) – "Bett" (singu-lar)). In this case, the morpheme boundaryis within the Trochee. Not all CvC1red willreduce to 1-syllable words, such as the wordfor "rattle" ("Rassel").

Identifiable features of this word type are thelax/short vowel (v) followed by a single con-sonant sound and a reduction syllable con-taining the letter <e> pronounced as schwa/@/.

• Type 3: C-v-C1-C2-red ("r-a-s-t-e-n"):The third type of word is easier than the sec-ond one for the learner, as there are two dis-tinct consonant sounds in the center of theword to help denote the tenseness of the pre-ceding vowel. No orthographic particulari-ties need to be mastered. The 1-syllable formCvC1C2 derives directly from the 2-syllableTrochee ("rasten" (verb) – "Rast" (noun)). Inthis case, the morpheme boundary is withinthe Trochee. Not all CvC1C2red will reduceto 1-syllable words, such as the word for turn:"Wende". Identifiable features of this word

type are the lax/short vowel (v) followed bytwo consonant sounds and a reduction sylla-ble containing the letter <e> pronounced asschwa /@/.

• Other categories of words include foreignwords and high-frequency words as wellas constructed words (compound words andthose including prefix and suffix). These arenot considered separately for the purpose ofthis study as they decompose either into theaforementioned formats or do not pertain toGerman phonics rules.

3.2 SentencesThere are numerous publications regarding thedefinition of sentence readability (Glöckner et al.,2006; Sitbon and Bellot, 2008; DuBay, 2008).Nelson (2012) is an example of a recent overviewof such measures. Most of them have been de-signed for English. Regarding German language,little research has been done on that subject. Wecan cite (Hancke et al., 2012) where the authorsused a number of different features to determinesentence readability: average number of words,characters, syllables, lexical features (noun andverb token ratios, textual lexical diversity, ...), syn-tactic features (number of noun or verb phrases,average length of a noun phrase, ...), languagemodels (trained with texts for children vs. news-papers) and morphological features (ratio of finiteverbs, compounds, ...).

However, the goal of the study presented hereis not exactly to measure a sentence readability,but to describe the progression in the structures’complexity (word-level clues are considered sep-arately, as described in Subsection 3.1). Hence,for the purpose of written language acquisition aprogression as described by Clahsen (1982; 1988)for L1 acquisition in children is chosen as a firstapproach. (A more detailed analysis of sentencestructures can be found in Berkling (2014)). Forthe purpose of this study, sentence structures aredistinguished at the following levels:

• LEVEL 1: One-word utterances withoutcounting articles, so it covers simple nounphrases such as "Peter" and "eine Katze" (acat) and imperative verbs "Lauf!" ("Run!").

• LEVEL 2: Two-word utterances withoutcounting articles, so simple noun phrases (asdescribed for level 1) + Verb in present tense

("Peter isst" ("Peter is eating"). "Eine Katzeläuft" ("A cat is running") or noun phrasesincluding adjectives not followed by a verb:"die kleine Katze" ("the little cat").

• LEVEL 3: Common sentences, includingAdjectives, Adverbs, ... So, noun phrases (in-cluding complex ones, such as article + ad-jective + noun) + Verb with or without Ob-ject: "Die kleine Katze." ("the little cat.")."Die kleine Katze läuft" ("The little cat isrunning"). "Ich gehe nach Hause" ("I am go-ing home").

– past and future tenses, built with a con-jugated auxiliary (2nd position) and aninfinitive (future) or past participle (pasttense) form of the meaningful verb, lo-cated at the end of the sentence: "Wirwerden nächsten Sommer nach Spanienfahren". ("We will go to Spain nextSummer"). "Du hast spät in der Nachtgearbeitet". ("You have worked late inthe night").

– modal verbs: used to express obligation,ability or will. These verbs are conju-gated and located in the second positionin the sentence, then the verb on whichthe modality applies is located at theend of the sentence: "Du sollst morgennicht kommen" ("You should not cometomorrow").

– compound verbs: conjugated verb is in2nd position, the particle is at the endof the sentence: "Die Sonne geht im-mer früher auf" ("The sun rises ear-lier and earlier") – The compound verb"aufgehen" (to rise) has a differentmeaning than the verb "gehen" (to go).

• LEVEL 5: complex sentences. Dependingon the kind of clause, verb positions followdifferent rules. Thus, we have distinguishedtwo subcategories, to reflect different com-plexities: the coordinate considered as anindependent sentence, where the verb is lo-cated in 2nd position (in both of the clauses).e.g., "Ich bin fertig und ich gehe jetzt in dieSchule" ("I am ready and I go to the schoolnow"), or in subordinate clauses with the verblocated at the end of the subordinate clause:"Ich denke, dass er intelligent ist" ("I thinkthat he is smart").

Sentence containing several levels are classifiedas the highest: "Ich werde ein Buch kaufen, weilich viel lese." ("I will buy a book, because I reada lot.") – is thus considered as Level 5.

4 System

Three software modules as shown in Figure 2 arebuilt to analyze the primary reader texts. A synthe-sizer, that performs automatic syllabification andmorpheme boundary segmentation called Balloon,a word classification system (Berkling and Re-ichel, 2014) that builds on Balloon output, and asyntactic parser (Petrov et al., 2006) followed by asentence classifier.

4.1 Balloon and Lexical Analysis

The word counter uses the output of Balloon,which works roughly as follows, for detailssee (Reichel, 2012).

The Grapheme-phoneme (G2P) conversionis carried out by a C4.5 decision tree (Quinlan,2003). Syllable boundaries are placed in frontof each sonority minimum, and their locationsare subsequently adjusted in case German syllablephonotactics is violated. Word stress is again as-signed by a C4.5 tree that predicts for each syllablewhether it is stressed or not. Part of speech (POS)labels were assigned by a Markov tagger that ad-ditionally makes use of information stored in wordsuffix strings. Relevant suffix strings are extractedby means of an adaptation of the peak and plateaualgorithm of Nascimento (1998). As POS inven-tory the Stuttgart Tübingen tag set (Schiller et al.,1995) is used.

The morphological analysis yields a flat seg-mentation of a word into morphemes and theirmorpheme classes. Each word is therefore de-composed into phonemes, syllables, stress mark-ers and morpheme boundaries that are then usedby the morpheme and syllable counter. The wordcounter simply counts new and previously seensyllables and morphemes for each page and thenplots new vs. previously seen numbers for eachpage. The word classifier uses syllable and mor-pheme boundaries to filter out the 2-syllable wordsthat match the Trochee types and their 1-syllablederivatives as described in Section 2 by theirunique identifying features in a rule based system.

Figure 2: System Modules for calculating Features

4.2 Sentence Classifier

The sentence classifier takes its input from theBerkley’s parser for German, with -tokenize(to use the integrated tokenizer) and -accurate(favours accuracy over speed) options. A smallset of simple rules - including ones designed toovercome some mistakes made by the parser - isused to assign levels according to Section 3.3 indecreasing order:

• looking for subordinate or coordinateclauses; this information is generally pro-vided by the Berkley’s parser. However, toincrease recall (some of these clauses wherenot tagged as such by the parser), it has herebeen re-inforced by an upper layer using alist of words introducing subordinate clauses(dass, ob, ...) or coordinate clauses (und,oder, ...) and looking for verbs positionsaround these specific words in order to makethe disctinction between "Ich habe einenBruder und eine Schwester." ("I have abrother and a sister.") and "Ich spiele und icharbeite." ("I play and I work.").

• looking for auxiliary in 2nd position and pastparticiple or infinite verb at the end of thesentence for level 4. Or finite verb in sec-ond position and particle at the end of the sen-tence.

• number of words and their part of speech forlevels 1 and 2.

5 Data

Various primary texts were transferred into elec-tronic format up to page 50. The primers werechosen for their popularity and opposing method-ologies ranging from no apparent methodology to-wards syllable, grapheme, and whole word ap-proach. The two old primers from 1877 and 1904

have been analyzed only in part. Their makeupis different from today’s primers. Separate sec-tions are devoted to grapheme introduction, word-level training and sentence level training withinprogressively complex texts (as measured by sen-tence and word structure complexity). These sec-tions have been extracted to demonstrate progres-sion. Table 1 lists the available data.

Readers Primary Number NumberMethodology of Words of pages

Primer A Whole word 1259 FirstPrimer B Syllable strict 593 50Primer C Phonics 1877 580 pagesPrimer D Syllable 1010 (exceptPrimer E Grapheme 1265 oldPrimer F Grapheme 932 primers)Primer G None 1328Primer H Phonics 1904 320

Table 1: Primary Readers Used in Study.

Figure 3: Repetition of words for practice, com-paring four primers.

6 Evaluation

Due to limited space, only the results for selectedreaders are displayed where they show prominentdifferences. Results are reported for morphemeand syllable repetition, progression of Trocheetypes, and sentence complexities.

6.1 Ability to Practice on Words andSyllables

Figures 3 and 4 show how many words or sylla-bles are repeated or new for each page. There isquite a large difference in training when compar-ing Primers F & A with E & G, where there issubstantially less repetition.

Figure 4: Repetition of syllables for practice, com-paring four primers.

6.2 Progression towards Complexity at wordlevel

The three diagrams in Figures 5 and 6 (See Ap-pendix) show three different versions of progres-sion for the different Trochee types and their 1-syllable derivatives. The figures are generated bylooking at the distribution across the word typesfor every 5 consecutive words. Each slice on thex-axis therefore represents five words. The y-axiscounts the number of word types for that slicefrom 1-5.

6.3 Progression at the Sentence Level

As depicted in the Appendix, Figures 7 to 9 showthe progression in sentence complexity through-out the primers for three different books. Fig-ure 7 depicts Primer F and some progression inthe sentence structure can be seen throughout thereader. At the beginning of the book, there arelots of simple utterances (mainly Level 1, so Nounor Article+Noun), no Level 5 sentences (subordi-nate and coordinate clauses) and a few Level 3sentences. As we proceed, we can observe moreand more Level 3 sentences and the appearance ofLevel 4 sentences (verb tricks), while the numberof Level 1 sentences decreases significantly. Atthe end of the book, there are lots of Level 4 and 5sentences and almost no simple ones.

In contrast, Figure 8 depicts Primer E with noprogression at all in the sentences structure. Allthe levels are merged all along the book, meaningchildren learn a few words and directly use them incomplex sentences. Level 3 is the highest level ofcomplexity reached, significantly diminishing thesyntactic exercices that more complex sentencesoffer.

Figure 9 shows Primer from 1904 depicting the

progression taken from the special section on prac-ticing sentence complexity. This progression isvisible in the diagram. At the beginning of the an-alyzed part of the book, it can be observed thatmost of the sentences belong to Level 3. Thentheir number is slightly decreasing as we browseto the end of the book. Meanwhile there are an in-creasing number of Level 4 and 5 sentences. Thenumber of high complexity sentences is signifi-cantly larger here than observed in contemporaryprimers.

7 Conclusion

Looking at primers through a quantitative lens re-vealed large differences in primary reading mate-rial for first graders who are introduced to readingwith these materials. It is important to be aware ofsuch differences that may not be apparent immedi-ately. Today, these effects are not studied in quan-titative, systematic manner and teachers are notaware of the detailed particularities of their mate-rials. Obviously, these primers are only one com-ponent of many materials chosen by teachers towork with the children in training their reading andwriting skills. This type of analysis covers onlyone aspect of the classroom dynamics. However,it would be desirable to see a clear progression inthe examined material and an explicit goal of theskills that the students in first grade should be ableto reach along with a defined progression in thatdirection. Based on our work, there is no evidentanswer as to which methodology has a clearer pro-gression at different levels. None of the contem-porary primers show the distinctive marks of thetwo chosen older versions that contain an apparentprogression at the word and the sentence level thattakes the elementary student from the simple tothe complex. Looking at the older primers, muchmore complexity was demanded from first gradersat the end of the school year. It may be that in or-der to reach that level more practice opportunitieswere supplied and explicit progression at variouslevels was needed.

Future work will have to study whether there isa cause and effect here. The old approach providesa stark contrast to our primers in use today and to-day’s primers differ significantly even among eachother regarding practice and progression. None ofthe modern readers seem to spend the time (whencompared to the older primers) on the typical Ger-man word structure of the Trochee. This work has

shown that there are differences between readers,some of which are not well studied, and that thereis a need to study the consequences this materialhas on student’s learning and achievements.

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Figure 5: An excerpt from Primer H from 1904, showing progression from 2-syllable types “geben” to “betten” to “besten”to 1-syllable types and then proceeding to mix all variants in training.(x-axis = 5 word slice, y-axis = number of words of thattype).

Figure 6: Primers E (at the top) and D show two different ways of using words. While E spends moretime on High-Frequency words, Primer D spends time on syllables that are not real words. (x-axis = 5word slice, y-axis = number of words of that type).

Figure 7: Progression of sentence level complexities for Primer F. Some progression to Level 5 is visiblewith little practice at level 5.

Figure 8: Progression of sentence level complexities for Primer E. Level 3 and 1 are exercised but thereis no visible progression.

Figure 9: Progression of sentence level complexities for Primer H (1904) from Level 3 to Level 5 withincreasingly significant practice at Level 5.