Katinka

Mangelschots

After graduating as a master in linguistics and literature for German and French at the Catholic University of Leuven, Katinka Mangelschots continued her studies with a master in language education.

Since April 2019 she works as a PhD student for the GRASP project, investigating together with Lisa Klasen the “Effects of Grammatical Reflection on Spelling among Multilingual Pupils.” Providing multilingual fourth graders in Luxembourg with a syntactic training in German and French, the project examines the short- and long-term benefits of the training, and possible transfer effects from the trained into the non-trained language. The PI of the project is Constanze Weth and Katinka Mangelschots’ focus is on the German language.

Research interests

Second Language Acquisition

Psycholinguistics

Language Education

Contrastive Linguistics

French

German

Spelling Acquisition

Intervention Study

Latest content Katinka Mangelschots took part in

Humanities

Using grammatical reflection to get a grasp on syntactic orthographic markers

Although the Latin script focusses on phonological representation, many orthographic forms
in French and German refer to syntactic, grammatical structures. These syntactic markers are not represented in phonology. Therefore, learners must acquire knowledge about these silent syntactic structures in order to spell correctly.
GRASP, a research project of the Institute for Research on Multilingualism from the University of Luxembourg investigates how explicit teaching of grammatical reflection enhances the spelling skills of grade 4 pupils in relation to orthographic syntactic markers that are not orally expressed.