Linguistic reasoning for secondary school students: The case of identifying syntactic functions in L1 grammar education

The ability to identify syntactic functions is a core learning objective in L1 grammar education in the German school system. We present an intervention study that explored the benefits of introducing secondary school students to linguistic concepts such as event structure, constituency, syntactic arguments vs. adjuncts, and the diversity of case assignment in German. We tested the performance of two different groups of secondary schoolers: One was taught according to traditional textbook materials; the other group received the linguistic intervention. Our results are mixed. On the one hand, both groups persist on traditional strategies that are linguistically insufficient and known to lead to false predictions. On the other hand, the linguistic intervention seems to complement those deficient strategies and overall leads to better performance in identifying syntactic functions. We conclude that instead of revolutionizing current school curricula, linguistics should tailor its theoretical concepts to the traditional concepts in a way that the linguistic tools put the insufficient strategies in perspective without abandoning them altogether.