Bilingual Kindergarten:The influence of second language acquisition English on the first language acquisition, German for children in pre-school age

This particular study assesses the level of German in a group of 64 children who regularly attend a bilingual preschool. The assessment involves a standardised test that is normed on a group of monolingual German children (Language Development test for children aged 3 – 5, SETK, Grimm et al., 2001). The participants include 54 German children from 7 different German-English bilingual preschools in Germany as well as 10 bilingual English-German children attending a bilingual English-German preschool in the UK. The SETK includes 4 different subtests that assess children’s comprehension of sentences, morphological rule formation, phonological working memory, as well as sentence repetition. The results show that all children developed age-appropriate German language skills. This means that the exposure of another language at preschool level had no negative influence on the development of the children’s first language. Explanations for this result include the children’s family background and exposure to the language at home, as well as the way German was used by preschool teachers in the immersion setting.