Belke, E.
Sprachwissenschaftliches Institut, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Understanding orthography as a code for grammatical relations enables beginning readers/writers to process increasingly complex, literate texts. In Germany, the likelihood of a child to attain high levels of literacy is linked more strongly to the socioeconomic status of the family than in most other EU countries. I argue that this is in part to blame on the most prominent didactic approach to learning to write and read in German, which is founded on several misconceptions of language acquisition and language learning, especially concerning the power and scope of implicit learning. In this poster, I shall present an analysis of orthographic errors of children taught with this approach, highlighting its shortcomings from an orthographic and psycholinguistic point of view and discussing the benefits of alternative, more strongly orthographically motivated teaching approaches.