What you apply is not what you learn! Examining students' strategies in German capitalization tasks Nathalie Rzepka Hans-Georg Müller Katharina Simbeck Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Universität Potsdam Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin Potsdam Berlin
[email protected] [email protected] katharina.simbeck @htw-berlin.de ABSTRACT Previous research has further indicated that these cognitive strate- The ability to spell correctly is a fundamental skill for participating gies for capitalization result in different patterns of errors that can in society and engaging in professional work. In the German lan- be distinguished from each other [18]. While some learners con- guage, the capitalization of nouns and proper names presents major sider the entire phrase when deciding whether to capitalize a word, difficulties for both native and nonnative learners, since the defini- others focus on only the word itself, especially the word ending, as tion of what is a noun varies according to one’s linguistic perspec- an indication of the correct capitalization. Other learners use the tive. In this paper, we hypothesize that learners use different cogni- words’ meaning or take a pragmatic approach. tive strategies to identify nouns. To this end, we examine capitali- This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of learners’ zation exercises from more than 30,000 users of an online spelling cognitive strategies while processing capitalization tasks in Ger- training platform. The cognitive strategies identified are syntactic, man spelling courses. To this end, we use anonymized learning data semantic, pragmatic, and morphological approaches. The strategies on capitalization from the online platform orthografietrainer.net.