The number of bilingual kindergartens in Germany is gradually increasing. There is a growing consensus on the positive effects of bilingual education programmes for young learners regarding the development of their cognitive and social skills (Wode 2009). Yet, only very few studies (see Steinlen & Piske 2016 for an overview) have focused on the linguistic knowledge of English that the children acquire in a German-English bilingual kindergarten programme.
The present study aims to address this gap by investigating the receptive and productive English L2 grammatical knowledge of nine German L1 children during their time in a German-English bilingual kindergarten. The children's language data were analysed and compared to each other to examine their syntactic and morphological knowledge six months before they transferred to primary school. The data were collected via four different tasks: a narrative task based on the picture book "Frog, where are you?" (Meyer 1969), the ELIAS grammar test (Kersten, Piske, Rhode, Steinlen & Weitz n. d.) and two picture description tasks. The learners' language use was recorded, transcribed and then analysed via different means, amongst others, the developmental hierarchy proposed by Processability Theory (Pienemann 2005).
The findings of the study provide insights into the implicit grammatical knowledge of English, which German L1 children acquire during their time in a bilingual kindergarten. The results offer implications for the continuation of such programmes with very young language learners. Possible consequences for the transition to primary school will also be discussed.
