<i>*breakfist, *breackfest, *brakefast oder *brackfust</i>? Orthographische Kompetenzen im Englischen in einem bilingualen Grundschulprogramm in Deutschland

The present study examined English spelling skills of fourth-graders attending a bilingual German- English primary school programme in Germany. English texts produced by monolingual and multilingual children were examined with regard to orthographic error types and their causes. The results of the English writing test showed that the children reached level A2 at the end of grade 4. In the subtest for free writing the English spelling errors were mainly substitutions and omissions. These can be traced back to intralingual and interlingual reasons, with analogies from English and interferences from German (i.e. small and capital letters) being the most frequent causes of errors. Overall, children's linguistic background did not have any influence on the test results, i.e. not only the German but also the multilingual children relied on German in their English text production. However, since the total number of errors per text is relatively low, the fourth-graders seem to be in the transitional stage with regard to their foreign-language spelling skills.