Action research with my stepson

I would like to share an outcome of an action research that I have done with my stepson Nick.

Nick grew up in Switzerland but with Swedish as mother tongue. Before he started staying with his father every other weekend at the age of four, he hardly spoke any Swiss German at all. This lack of German always caused him trouble in school... Then at the age of 10, he moved to Sweden with his mother and his two sisters and had no point of contact to the German language except for the very meagre Skype conversations and the few weeks he spent in Switzerland on his holidays.

Then last summer, he decided he wanted to live with his father and now he stays with us and goes back to the Swiss school. Most people took it for granted, that now, after being separated from a German speaking environment for two years, he'd have lots of trouble in school. At the beginning it surely wasn't easy for him at all but then I had to do an action research for my teachers education and I decided to do it on him. I had him read (all) the books of the "Magic Tree House" of Mary Pope Osborne in German and at the same time listen to the audio book of those books. This way he got through a book in a reasonable time (about 50-60 minutes) because he could adjust his reading speed to the speed of the reader.

Now, as theoretical background of my action research I used a part of one of my favourite books by Vera F. Birkenbihl called "Boys and Girls. How they learn" (the book is in German and I'll add it to my list of references) Now Birkenbihl (2012, p.72f) explains that John MEDCALF, a special education teacher, became aware that kids (mainly boys) had trouble reading, if they couldn't establish a connection between sound and caption of a word. So the key is to listen to an audio book and reading the same text at the same time. Her way of language learning is based on this awareness too.

So if we are used to reading letter by letter to try to figure out the word - which takes so much time and energy - start to work with his method, we don't have time to look at the letters. We have to start looking at the whole words. The connection of sound and caption gets stronger and stronger the more often we hear and see a word and suddenly it's built so that wherever we see this word, we know it straight away without having to think at all. Now about 80% of the words in these books (actually in pretty much all books or texts) are basic vocabulary. So imagine if our brain recognises 80% of all words without us having to read them consciously, how much easier will it be to get through a text even without the help of an audio book?

It was amazing to see Nicks improvement in German, which at that time was his second language too. I tested his reading abilities without audio books before and after reading through all 44 volumes of the "Magic Tree House" and the difference was huge. If anyone is interested in the whole action research paper I wrote, just let me know. But it's written in German...

Well if this works for him, I'm a hundred percent sure that it can work for all kids learning a foreign language. The main difference I see between Nick learning German and a primary class learning English is, that Nick would have understood those audio books without any help. His receptive oral language skills were there and so he just improved his receptive written skills and his productive skills. Now in the class I will be teaching, I will have to work on the receptive oral skills first, before I can just have them read books themselves like Nick did. But I'm sure they can get there too.

Birkenbihl, Vera F. (2012). Jungen und Mädchen: wie sie lernen. 6. Auflage. Bergisch Gladbach:
Breuer & Wardin
(Boys and Girls: how they learn)