The development of receptive and productive written language skills in German

In empirical educational research, reading and writing are often considered separately. Reading, mostly focused on reading comprehension, is considered akey competence for educational success and often serves as an indicator of overall language skills. The complementary ability to produce texts is the focus of research in linguistics or second language teaching. The relationship between receptive and productive abilities is less frequently discussed. Our contribution is concerned primarily with the question of what conclusions can be drawn about the ability to read, i.e. the understanding of texts, on the ability to produce textsor vice versa. Special attention is paid to determining whether there are differential relationships between text comprehension and text production skills for learners at different stages of literacy acquisition. Based on previous research on the development of language competence in adolescence, assumptions about the interrelationships of reading and writing skills were formulated and translated into atheoretical model that was subjected to empirical testing. The analysis is based on data from three phases of the panel study Mehrsprachigkeitsentwicklung im Zeitverlauf (MEZ), funded by the BMBF. In this study, the language development of approximately 2000 young people growing up with German-Russian, German-Turkish and monolingual-German is examined over aperiod of three years. Based on the analysis of language data in German, the current contribution presents the initial results revealing students' language development over time. The analyses relate latent variables on reading comprehension and lexical diversity in writing on each other in the context of cross-lagged panel models. Results indicate that receptive skills initially have asignificant influence on productive skills, however, this influence becomes weaker. This indicates that other factors relevant to the development of writing skills come to the fore.