Cross-linguistic Influence – A Cross-sectional Study with Particular Reference to Finnish-speaking Finnish-speaking and English-speaking learners of German Anu Ilomaki B.A. (Mod.) CSLL Final Year Project, May 2005 Supervisor: Dr. David Singleton
Declaration
I hereby declare that this thesis is entirely my own work and that it has not been submitted as an exercise for a degree at any other university.
__________________________________ May 4, 2005 Anu Ilomaki
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Acknowledgements
Firstly I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. David Singleton for his help with this paper. I am very grateful for his support supp ort and feedback during the course of the project. I would especially like to thank Dr. Carl Vogel, the course coordinator of CSLL. His continuous encouragement and guidance during the four years of the course are greatly appreciated. I would also like to thank Katrin Eberbach, my German lecturer in Trinity College, and Maria Lappalainen, my secondary school teacher in Vehkalahden lukio (Vehkalahti Secondary School) in Finland. Without their help I would not have been able to find suitable test groups for the present study. Thank you to all the participants in the present study, both here in Trinity College as well as in Vehkalahti Secondary School. A special thank you to my family, friends and classmates for their on-going support and advice. They have been an irreplaceable support group not only during this project but during the whole four years of the course.
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The difference between learning a closely related language and a totally unrelated one can be likened to the situation of two friends, a good tennis player and a good soccer player, who both take up squash while still continuing to have tennis and soccer respectively respectively as their main games. (Ringbom, 1987:130)
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Contents 1 General Introduction and Structure………………………………………………….1
1.1 Aims……………………………………………… Aims…………………………………………………………………………...1 …………………………...1 1.2 Overview………………………………………… Overview…………………………………………………………………… ……………………………1 …1 1.3 Motivation………………… Motivation……………………………………………… …………………………………………………..2 ……………………..2
2 Cross-linguistic Influence: General Introduction……………………………………3
2.1 Introduction……………………………………… Introduction………………………………………………………………… ……………………………3 …3 2.2 The Development of Cross-linguistic Influence Research………........………4 2.3 Types and Features of Error Analysis…………………………………….…...8 Analysis…………………………………….…...8 2.4 Type and Extent of o f Cross-linguistic Influence: Factors………………………9 Factors………………………9 2.4.1 Learner-based Learner-based Factors…………………………………… Factors………………………………………...……10 …...……10 2.4.1.1 Proficiency and Stage of Learning………………...……..10 2.4.1.2 Age………………………………………………...……..11 Age………………………………………………...……..11 2.4.1.3 Linguistic Awareness……………………………...……..12 Awareness……………………………...……..12 2.4.1.4 Social and Educational Background…………………......13 2.4.2 Language-based Language-based Factors………………………………… Factors………………………………………...….14 ……...….14 2.4.2.1 Language Level……………………………………...…...14 Level……………………………………...…...14 2.4.2.2 Markedness and Prototypicality…………………….........14 Prototypicality…………………….........14 2.4.2.3 Psychotypology……………………… Psychotypology………………………………..............…15 ………..............…15 2.4.2.4 Production………………… Production…………………………………..............……16 ………………..............……16 2.5 Cross-linguistic Influence on the Lexicon……………………… Lexicon………………………………...…17 ………...…17 2.6 Cross-linguistic Influence on Grammar…………………………………...…22 Grammar…………………………………...…22 2.7 Avoidance: Cleverly Hidden or Accidentally Left out?..................................24 2.8 “Foreign Talk” and Interlanguage Transfer………………………………….25 Transfer………………………………….25 2.9 Concluding Summary…………………………………………………...…...26 Summary…………………………………………………...…...26 3 Five Languages…………………………………………………………………...…...28 4 The Present Study: Background…………...……………………………………..…31 4.1 Aims……………………………………………… Aims………………………………………………………………………….31 ………………………….31 4.2 Methodology……………………… Methodology…………………………………………………… ………………………………………....31 …………....31 4.3 Test Groups………………………… Groups…………………………………………………… …………………………………….….32 ………….….32 4.4 Problems……………………………………… Problems…………………………………………………………………… ……………………………..33 ..33 4.5 Concluding Summary…………………………………………………...…...34 Summary…………………………………………………...…...34 5 Analysis of the Present Study: Results and Discussion…………………………….35 5.1 Overall Mistakes………………………………………………………….….35 Mistakes………………………………………………………….….35 5.2 Cross-linguistic Influence: Finnish-speaking Students…………………..…..41 5.2.1 Lexicon……………………………………………… Lexicon…………………………………………………………….41 …………….41 5.2.1.1 Borrowing…………………… Borrowing………………………………………….…….42 …………………….…….42 5.2.1.2 Relexification……………………………… Relexification…………………………………….………44 …….………44 5.2.1.3 Hybrid……………………… Hybrid………………………………………………… ……………………………45 …45 5.2.1.4 Translation…………………………………… Translation……………………………………………….46 ………….46 5.2.1.5 Phonetic Influence……………………………………….46 Influence……………………………………….46 5.2.2 Grammar……………………………………… Grammar…………………………………………………………...47 …………………...47 iv
5.2.2.1 Morphology: Morpholog y: Grammatical Gender………………………47 5.2.2.2 Morphology: Word Formation……………………….…..48 5.2.2.3 Morphology: Case and Case Endings……………………49 5.2.2.4 Syntax: Articles……………………………… Articles…………………………………………..50 …………..50 5.2.2.5 Syntax: Prepositions………………………………..……51 Prepositions………………………………..……51 5.2.2.6 Syntax: Word Order………………………………...……51 Order………………………………...……51 5.2.3 Avoidance……………………………………………… Avoidance……………………………………………………...…..55 ……...…..55 5.3 Cross-linguistic Influence: English-speaking Students………………...……58 5.3.1 Lexicon……………………………………………… Lexicon………………………………………………………...…..58 ………...…..58 5.3.1.1 Borrowing…………………… Borrowing…………………………………………..…....58 ……………………..…....58 5.3.1.2 Relexification……………………………… Relexification……………………………………...……..59 ……...……..59 5.3.1.3 Hybrids……………………………………………...…… Hybrids……………………………………………...……59 59 5.3.1.4 Translation…………………………………… Translation…………………………………………….…60 ……….…60 5.3.2 Grammar……………………………………… Grammar……………………………………………………..…….61 ……………..…….61 5.3.2.1 Morphology: Morpholog y: Grammatical Gender………………..……..61 5.3.2.2 Morphology: Word Formation………………..………….61 5.3.2.3 Morphology: Case and Case Endings……………..……..62 5.3.2.4 Syntax: Articles……………………………… Articles………………………………..…………62 ..…………62 5.3.2.5 Syntax: Prepositions……………………………………..63 Prepositions……………………………………..63 5.3.2.6 Syntax: Word Order………………………….…………..63 Order………………………….…………..63 5.3.3 Avoidance……………………………………………… Avoidance………………………………………………………….67 ………….67 5.4 Comparison of the Two Test Groups……………………………...…………70 Groups……………………………...…………70 5.5 Comparison of the Results with Previous Study……………………………..71 Study……………………………..71 5.6 Concluding Summary……………………………………………….… Summary……………………………………………….……….74 …….74 6 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………….75 6.1 Achievements………………………………… Achievements………………………………………………………….…… ……………………….……..75 ..75 6.2 Summary of Cross-linguistic Influence: General Introduction………………75 Introduction………………75 6.3 Summary of the Present Study Results…………… R esults…………………………………...….76 ……………………...….76 6.4 Concluding Remarks…………………………………………… Remarks……………………………………………………...….76 ………...….76 Appendix…………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………..…….77 ……………………..…….77 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………….……96
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List of Figures 5.1: During the summer holidays she is going to go to Spain and live by the sea……….52 5.2: Their house will be sold next year …………………………………………………..52 …………………………………………………..52 5.3: Their house will be sold next year ..............................................................................53 ..............................................................................53 5.4: Their house will be sold next year ……………………………………………...…...53 ……………………………………………...…...53 5.5: , in which she lives with her friends…………………………………………...…….54 5.6: , because she loves swimming……………………………………………………….54 5.7: , because she loves swimming……………………………………………………….54 5.8: , which she shares with her friends………………………………………………….55 5.9: During the summer holidays she is going to go to Spain and live by the sea……….64 5.10: Their house will be sold next year ……………………………………………...….64 ……………………………………………...….64 5.11: Their house will be sold next year ………………………………………………....65 ………………………………………………....65 5.12: She has been living in Munich for four years……………………………...………65 5.13: , which she shares with her friends…………………………………………...……66 5.14: , where she lives with her friends…………………………………………………..66 5.15: , because she loves swimming………………………………………………...……66 5.16: , because she loves swimming………………………………………………..…….67
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List of Tables 2.1 Lexical transfer errors: Form versus meaning……………………………………….18 4.1 Participants in the present study……………………………………………………..33 study……………………………………………………..33 5.1: Overall mistakes made by the Finnish-speaking students in the second part of the test (translation)……………………………………………… (translation)……………………………………………….…37 .…37 5.2: Overall mistakes made by the English-speaking students in the second part of the test (translation)……………………………………………… (translation)………………………………………………….38 ….38 5.3: Overall mistakes made by the Finnish-speaking students in the second part of the test (translation)……………………………………………… (translation)………………………………………………….39 ….39 5.4: Overall mistakes made by the English-speaking students in the second part of the test (translation)…………………………………………….… (translation)…………………………………………….……40 …40 5.5: L1 Finnish students: words and phrases featuring cross-linguistic influence influence ..…56-57 5.6: L1 English students: words and phrases featuring cross-linguistic influence...…68-69 5.7: Types and amount of lexical transfer in the present study…………………...……..70
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Abstract
Cross-linguistic influence is one of the widest areas of second language acquisition research and while the main factors facilitating or preventing cross-linguistic influence are discussed in this dissertation, it can only be considered a brief introduction into this phenomenon. The first part of the dissertation concentrates on previous and on-going work in the field of cross-linguistic influence and provides a base for the analysis of the present study in the second part of the dissertation. In the present study, emphasis is on Finnish-speaking and English-speaking learners of German. The analysis of the present study aims to discuss and explain what triggered the cross-linguistic influence to appear in individual cases. While the results of the present study give an insight into the influence different languages may have on the acquisition process of an additional language, these results cannot be fully trusted to represent an entire population of learners.
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Chapter 1 General Introduction and Structure 1.1 Aims This paper will address some important issues in second language acquisition with distinct interest in cross-linguistic influence. Second language acquisition is an everyday phenomenon. There are some 6800 known languages in the 200 countries of the world. Due to historical, social, economical and political factors, speakers of these different languages have contact in everyday life - all over the world people are acquiring languages other than their native language. Some of this learning is done consciously, some unconsciously. Some of it is done in a classroom situation, some in a naturalistic environment. There are varying factors which affect the acquisition process and while this paper aims to discuss most of them, the main factor of interest is the learner’s native language as well as other previously acquired languages and their effect on the acquisition process and outcome.
1.2 Overview This paper is divided into six main chapters. After an introductory part in chapter 1, chapter 2 will give an overview on previous research in the field of cross-linguistic influence. Some historical turning points are laid out and previous work and study results are briefly discussed. With previous research work in mind, the next topics of discussion are different types of error analyses and ways of studying learner errors and language transfer. Bearing in mind that cross-linguistic influence is not the only factor affecting second language acquisition process the main factors possibly affecting this phenomenon are then discussed.
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Chapter 3 will explain some of the main differences between Finnish, English, German, Swedish and Irish, the five languages involved in the present study, and chapter 4 will explain background information regarding the experiment. Chapter 5 will present and discuss the results of my own experiment. This experiment uses written learner output to analyse learner errors and is purely interested in reasons why different errors may have resulted. My main aim was to study the role of other previously acquired languages, both the native language as well as other foreign languages, in second language acquisition. This experiment draws upon topics discussed in chapter 2 and provides evidence on many ideas discussed in this paper. p aper. The paper is completed with a final conclusion in chapter 6.
1.3 Motivation I chose to write this paper because I am greatly interested in languages and the way people learn them. One of my main motivations was the possibility to conduct an experiment of my own in this field and the chance to compare the results of my study with previous work done in this field.
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Chapter 2 Cross-linguistic Influence: General Introduction 2.1 Introduction The phenomenon of cross-linguistic influence has long been of interest to second language acquisition researchers. While the term “cross-linguistic influence” was first proposed in the eighties, several expressions referring to this phenomenon can be found in previous research publications in this area; language transfer, linguistic interference, language mixing, native language influence and the role of the mother tongue all refer to the same phenomenon, which shall be interchangeably referred to as cross-linguistic influence and language transfer in this study. The term “second language” is not restricted to mean the second language in order but is in general applied to any other language acquired after the mother tongue and can therefore in some cases also be the third, fourth or even the fifth language acquired. Although generally no distinction is made between a second language and additional languages, according to Cenoz, Hufeisen and Jessner (2002) some researchers have started to concentrate on aspects of third language acquisition in order to point out the differences between the acquisition and processing of two or more languages. According to (Odlin 1989) transfer is the influence resulting from similarities and differences between the target language and any other language that has been previously, and perhaps imperfectly, acquired. It is obvious that some transfer occurs in the process of second language acquisition, however, the amount and type of transfer vary according to several factors. Background factors, such as age, motivation, literacy and social class, make the learning experience of all individuals unique (Odlin 1989). Arguably, the amount of transfer is also related to the distance of the languages involved.
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2.2 The Development of Cross-linguistic Influence Research Not all researchers have accepted the importance of the native language effect on second language acquisition. In particular, those who hold an innatist view of language acquisition do not believe in any significant influences that the first language might have on the acquisition process of a second language. Some researchers go as far as saying sa ying that the acquisition processes are the same for the first and any additional languages. Most researchers have, however, by now accepted that cross-linguistic influence affects the acquisition process of another language. The assumption that most difficulties the second language learners face are due to his or her first language was first proposed during the post-war years and continued strongly until the 1960’s. The need for fo r contrastive analyses was justified justified early on through claims such as: The most efficient materials are those that are based upon a scientific description of the language to be learned, carefully compared with a parallel description of the native language of the learner. (Fries, 1945: 9) The first publication that identified cross-linguistic influence as an important Con tact by Uriel Weinrich (1953). The field continued to phenomenon was Language in Contact
raise interest and was investigated in more detail by Robert Lado in his 1957 publication Linguistics Across Acros s Cultures.
Lado’s idea of transfer was that ‘individuals ‘ individuals tend to transfer
the forms and meanings, and the distribution of forms and meanings of their native language and culture to the foreign language and culture’ (Lado, 1957: 2). This claim and the work it came from proved to be one of the most influential in the field of second language acquisition and it was the source of numerous empirical language contact studies in contrastive analysis.
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The single paramount fact about language learning is that it concerns, not problem solving, but the formation and performance of habits. (Brooks, 1960: 49) The behaviourist view, that learning was highly influenced by interference of prior knowledge and took place inductively through analogy rather than analysis, dominated the two decades following the Second World War. The notion of positive and negative transfer was first acknowledged during this period. Where the first and the second language were different, it was assumed that the learner’s first language knowledge would interfere with the second language knowledge, functioning negatively, and where the first and the second language were similar, the first language would aid the second language learning process, functioning positively. In addition to negative and positive transfer, Selinker has later used the term “neutral language transfer”. Researchers Researchers (Brooks 1960, Lado 1964) believed that teachers should focus their teaching on the predicted areas of difficulty, enforced by negative transfer. Due to pedagogic needs, Contrastive Analysis was developed to enable the identifying of these problem areas. The idea was to compare certain native languages and target languages and identify points of similarity or difference. These points were believed to aid pedagogical development and result in effective teaching. According to Lado, the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis was based on the following assumption: …the student who comes into contact with a foreign language will find some features of it quite easy and others extremely difficult. Those elements that are similar to his native language will be simple for him and those elements that are different will be difficult. (Lado, 1957: 2) Lado proposed a contrastive model, which step-by-step compared two systems, their sound systems, grammatical structures, vocabulary systems and so on. The classical contrastive analysis statements did not cater for careful descriptive and analytical studies of learners under specified conditions (Ellis, 1994). However, Lado (1957) had evidently
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realised that the list of problems obtained through the comparison of two languages was to be seen as a list of hypothetical problems, which would have to be validated by checking it against the actual speech of students. Through description and interlingual comparison, lists of linguistic differences between the learners’ first language and the target language, the presumed problem areas, were obtained. Lee (1968) even believed the interference coming from the learner’s native language to be the sole cause of difficulty and error in foreign language learning. Contrastive Analysis was doubted doub ted by several researchers, researchers, in particular researchers researchers who supported Chomsky’s idea of Universal Grammar, but it was in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s when the Contrastive Analysis hypothesis finally lost ground due to the findings of such researchers as Dulay and Burt (1973, 1974), who doubted the influence of the first language and the importance of negative transfer in the process of second language acquisition. Dulay and Burt linked first and second language acquisition and set up an alternative approach to contrastive analysis known as the “Creative Construction Hypothesis”, also labelled as the “L2=L1 Hypothesis”, according to which the second language learner makes the same errors as the first language leaner of the target language does. Whereas the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis provides a transfer theory, the L2=L1 hypothesis suggests a process of active organization in the learner’s mind. Contrastive Analysis has been criticised for inaccuracy in predicting learner errors, and cases where cross-linguistic comparisons fail to predict difficulties or where difficulties predicted do not occur have been emphasised. It is difficult to make precise predictions and generalisations as every learning process is individual and therefore learners may pursue different options. In the 1970’s, 1970 ’s, Error Analysis gained more interest, eventually replacing Contrastive Analysis. It was not a new development but largely thanks to the work of Corder it became recognised as a part of applied linguistics. Corder (1974) suggested that Error Analysis should start off by collecting samples of learner language and then proceed to identify, describe, explain and evaluate the errors found. In the last thirty years researchers have made considerable progress to establish methods to study cross-linguistic influence and its occurrence in acquisition situations. Selinker (1969) successfully compared the use of a particular structure in the native language, the target language and the interlanguage. Interlanguage was defined as a
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system intermediate between the mother tongue and the target language. Lately a new approach, which is based on a comparison of how learners with two or more native languages proceed with regard to target language structure present in one native language but absent in other, has been dominant. Master (1987) and Mesthrie and Dunne (1990) used this method while Jarvis (2000) argued both methods are needed for a comprehensive study. In the field of second language acquisition, language distance is only of interest if the phenomenon of language transfer can be proved. When talking about language distance, it is useful to refer to the traditional classification of language families. Where the mother tongue is formally similar to the target language, the learner will pass more rapidly along the developmental continuum (or some parts of it) than where it differs. (Corder, 1981: 101) While some decades ago Corder (1967) still argued that there is no fundamental difference in the acquisition processes for first and second languages, he did come up with a language distance hypothesis (1981), which suggests that the mother tongue acts differentially as a facilitating agent. He also proposes that not only the learner’s first language, but all other previously learned languages have a facilitating effect. Odlin (1989) maintains that language distance is a major determinant of the amount of time learners need to become highly proficient in a language. He cites the time allocation to the study of various foreign languages at the American Foreign Service Institute (FSI). In 1980’s Håkan Ringbom conducted interesting studies, where native speakers speakers of two different languages, Finnish and Swedish, were studied learning English as a second language under same living and background conditions in Finland. His results showed that especially during early days of second language acquisition, a native language, which is related to the target language can be of great help. The four main findings Ringbom states in his 1987 publication are: 1) language distance has an impact on cross-linguistic influence, 2) the influence of the first language is greater at early stages of acquisition than at later stages, 3) the influence of the first language is stronger at lower levels of
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proficiency, and 4) the influence of the first language tends to be stronger in more communicative tasks. The studies discussed above seem to lead to one conclusion; it has been shown that while the differences between the first and the second language may lead into difficulties, they will not definitely do so.
2.3 Types and Features of Error Analysis As discussed in the previous chapter, analysing learner errors is a common research method used in studies of cross-linguistic influence. To represent an entire population, a massive sample of several language use samples from a large number of learners must be collected. This way it is possible p ossible to obtain comprehensive lists of possible errors common to many learners of a particular population. Odlin (1989) names smaller samples of learner language specific or incidental. A specific sample is one sample of language use, collected from a limited number of learners, while an incidental sample is one sample collected from one learner only. Samples can be collected cross-sectionally, at a single point in time, or longitudinally, at successive points over a period of time. Several factors have been identified, which influence the types of errors learners make. Learners do not necessarily make the same errors in written and oral production, due to different processing conditions, and learners with one native language do not necessarily make the same errors as learners with another native language. Odlin (1989) identifies three language factors and three learner factors. The language factors are: medium (written or oral production), genre (form of production; a conversation, a lecture, an essay, a letter etc) and content (topic of communication). As learner factors, he identifies learner’s level of proficiency (elementary, intermediate, advanced), mother tongue and language learning experience, relating to whether language learning is classroom situated, naturalistic naturalistic or a mixture of both. Corder argues that error analysis should be restricted to the study of errors arising as a result of lack of knowledge and should not cater for mistakes occurring when learners fail to perform their competence, as mistakes are a performance phenomena also 8
found in native language production. Corder (1974) goes on to describe three types of errors: presystematic errors occurring when the learner is unaware of the existence of a particular rule in the target language, systematic errors occurring when the learner uses the wrong rule and postsystematic errors occurring when the learner knows the correct target language rule but uses it inconsistently making a mistake. As stated in Doughty and Long (2003), a further division of errors was made by Lott (1983), who identified transfer errors such as overextension of analogy, transfer of structure and interlingual or intralingual errors. Lott considers overextension of analogy to occur when the learner misuses an item because it shares similar features with an item in the learner’s native language. Transfer of structure is what is generally meant by transfer and it occurs when the learner makes use of an L1 feature instead of the target language one. When a particular distinction does not exist in the first language, the error arising is likely to be interlingual/intralingual and while it is not always easy to distinguish between intralingual and transfer errors, previous research suggests that a large number of errors are of intralingual origin rather than cross-linguistic. cross-linguistic. Studying learner language by errors has been criticised for its interest on what the learners do wrong and lack of acknowledgement for what the learners do right. Error Analysis does not cover for avoidance of difficult structures and words and therefore is not fully comprehensive.
2.4 Type and Extent of Cross-linguistic Influence: Factors Some researchers consider cross-linguistic influence deriving from the first language to be more of a communication strategy than a learning strategy. Newmark and Reibel (1968) stated that when a learner does not know how to use a certain rule in the target language, he can only use the knowledge he already has to make up for what he does not know. This description has later been named the Ignorance Hypothesis. A similar
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reference was made by Krashen (1983), who sees transfer as the result of falling back on old knowledge when new knowledge is lacking and calls this phenomenon “padding”. Evidently, there are several factors, which influence the amount and type of language transfer. In this chapter these factors are divided into learner-based factors and language-based factors. Learner-based factors are more individual and greatly depend on how and where the learner has acquired the second language. The way the learner views the target language and how distant he/she perceives it from the native language is a factor relating to both learner- and language-based factors. Language-based factors are factors the learner cannot largely affect, features typical for each language and features influencing the learner’s mental picture of the target language. The most important factors Ringbom identifies are stage of learning, type of utterance, level of linguistic analysis and the learner’s age and mode mo de of learning, as adults seem to make more use of their first language than children. Other researchers have come up with conditions, which are seen to aid or prevent cross-linguistic influence. These constraints 3 are language level, social factors, markedness, prototypicality, language distance and psychotypology, and developmental factors.
2.4.1 Learner-based Factors 2.4.1.1 Proficiency and Stage of Learning
The extent of cross-linguistic influence or “transfer load”, as Ringbom calls it, is related to several factors in second language learning. Ringbom (1987) considers the stage of learning to be one of the major factors. At the early stages of learning the role of the first language is evidently more important than it is at more advanced level. The individual characteristics of the learner as well as the individual styles of learning and learner’s knowledge of other languages including the learner’s mother tongue and other foreign languages are seen to affect the appearance of cross-linguistic influence in learner 3
According to Ringbom (1987), a constraint could be anything that prevents the learner either from noticing cross-linguistic cross-linguistic similarity or from deciding that the similarity is a real and useful one.
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production. Therefore, proficiency is one of the major factors determining the likelihood of language transfer. One way of looking at the role of developmental factors is to take the learner’s first language as a starting point of second language acquisition, in a process where the first language rules are gradually replaced by the target language rules when acquisition proceeds. This would suggest transfer to be more evident in the early stages of development. The second view on developmental factors is that through natural principles of language acquisition, the first language works together with the developmental factors and this way determines the course of interlanguage. This would suggest transfer to be selective along the developmental axis. The amount of exposure to the target language is, of o f course, a decisive d ecisive factor in the learner’s proficiency. In cases, where the learner is multilingual or has to some extent acquired additional languages, the level of second language competence must be of certain degree in order for that second language to provide material for transfer. Shanon (1991) goes as far as stating that often the most recently acquired, and therefore the weakest, language is the source of transfer. This hypothesis seems to hold, particularly with regard to lexical borrowings, but it is, however, apparent that if the learner has previously acquired a language more related to the target language than the weakest language, this related language is more likely to be the source of transfer than the most recently acquired one. The production factor is closely related to the stage of learning, since learners often draw on their first language to fill a lexical or syntactic gap when they lack the linguistic knowledge of the structure or feature in question. In such cases, transfer can be seen as a strategy to overcome difficulties.
2.4.1.2 Age
The general idea behind the age factor and language transfer is that child learners are less likely to draw on their first language than adult learners. Some researchers claim that child second language acquisition is driven by Universal Grammar and therefore the native language influence cannot be seen as an important factor. Odlin (1989), however, 11
claims adults to be in some ways more flexible than children and therefore the “younger is better” principle should not be trusted blindly. A research project on cross-linguistic influence in third language acquisition in a Basque school, where English was taught as a second language to native speakers of Basque and Spanish showed that older learners tend to present more cross-linguistic influence than younger learners. Possibly due to lower metalinguistic ability, the younger learners did not perceive objective linguistic distance similarly as the older learners did, but rather found both Spanish and Basque terms equally transferable (Cenoz, Hufeisen and Jessner, 2001). More recent studies have proposed the age factor not to be a very decisive factor in second language acquisition or in cross-linguistic influence.
2.4.1.3 Linguistic Awareness
The learner’s linguistic awareness plays a key role in his language performance and acquisition process. Linguistic awareness can be acquired itself and is often related to educational background. While linguistic awareness is mainly conscious, our mind can and often does make linguistic identifications also on an unconscious level. There have been two attempts to illustrate constraints on transfer. These attempts have looked at interaction between linguistic and general cognitive capacities. The Transfer to Somewhere Principle by Andersen (1983) focuses on conditions that will cause learners to make interlingual identifications and states that a grammatical form or structure will consistently occur in interlanguage as a result of transfer only if there is a typological similarity between the two languages with regard to this feature. As a complement to Andersen’s principle, Kellerman (1995) came up with Transfer to Nowhere Principle, according to which cross-linguistic influence might occur even when no basis for interlingual identification seems to exist. Not all cross-linguistic influence is noticeable straight away. Ringbom (1987) talks about covert cross-linguistic influence being relevant to the problem of avoidance and occurring when first language based procedures are used to compensate for gaps of target language knowledge. According to Ringbom, in early stages of second language 12
production the learner frequently assumes that linguistic redundancy works the same way in the second language as it does in the first language. Therefore morphological or lexical items perceived to be redundant from the point of view of the first language will frequently be omitted or avoided. Covert cross-linguistic influence can be seen as entirely negative transfer since no similarity between the first and the second language has been perceived and the first language procedures have been used because no second language procedures were available.
2.4.1.4 Social and Educational Educational Background
As all language acquisition takes place in a social matrix, it is evident that some, but not all social background factors make a difference in cross-linguistic influence. Tarone (1982) examined sociolinguistic factors and came to the conclusion that crosslinguistic influence from first language is more evident when learners are paying more attention to how they speak as they are using all of their potential resources. This is a rather surprising claim as it could be thought that the more careful the learner is in his or her production, the more he or she is paying attention to the rules and lexicon of a particular language and therefore the less cross-linguistic influence would arise. Odlin (1989) includes educational background and literacy as a factor in positive transfer. Learners who have highly developed language skills, such as reading, writing and rich vocabulary in their native language will most likely find that these skills facilitate second language acquisition. It could therefore be argued that less educated learners in a naturalistic learning environment will show fever constraints regarding language transfer.
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2.4.2 Language-based Factors 2.4.2.1 Language Level
Language level relates to the common belief that cross-linguistic influence appears more frequently and noticeably at the levels of phonology, lexis and discourse than grammar. Ellis (1994) considers the above to be one of the main findings in explaining learner errors. Learners’ more developed metalingual awareness of grammar could be one of the main reasons why cross-linguistic influence does not seem to be as frequent at grammatical level. In a classroom environment, learners are often exposed to grammatical rules and it seems that grammar is the area of language learning, which is given the most attention. Although Ringbom (1987) states that some errors in written production occur due to different pronunciation in the two languages, he points out that learners do not invariably transfer the phonological features of their first language. Ringbom studied two groups, Finnish-speaking and Swedish-speaking Finns, who lived in Finland and had the same social and cultural settings. He found that the majority of lexical errors the two groups learning English made could be attributed to the transfer of partial translation equivalents. The assumption that acquisition of lexis appears to be facilitated if the target language is related to the learner’s first language is partly proved by the fact that Swedish-speaking learners seem to acquire English vocabulary faster than Finnish-speaking learners.
2.4.2.2 Markedness and Prototypicality Prototypicality
Markedness is defined by the terms “marked” and “unmarked”. In linguistic terms, marked features are seen “special” in relation to the more “basic” unmarked ones. For example, the present tense is unmarked for English verbs while the past tense is marked. Also, German word order can be considered marked in relation to English word order, as
14
German permits two word orders, main clause SVO and subordinate clause SOV but English word order is consistently SVO. Kellerman (Kellerman and Sharwood Smith, 1986, Ellis, 1994) suggests that a definition of markedness or prototypicality can be provided by investigating native speakers’ judgements of similarity and taking into account that learners, irrespective of their level of second language proficiency, see some features as being more transferable than others. Idioms, for example, tend not to be transferred.
2.4.2.3 Psychotypology Psychotypology
Psychotypology (also known as typology) appears to be the most important factor in determining the likelihood of language transfer. Kellerman (1978) refers to the perception of the second language and distance from the first language as psychotypology. According to him, transferability depends on the perceived distance between the first language and the second language and the structural organisation of the learner’s first language. Hence, the perception of linguistic distance and the perception of transferability transferability can prove to be more important than actual objective linguistic distance. Language distance can be regarded as linguistic, meaning the actual degree of difference between the languages, or as psycholinguistic, meaning the learners’ assumption of the degree of difference (Ellis, 1994). Language distance is seen as the main factor in positive (and negative) transfer; learners generally find it easier to learn a second language similar to their first one. Ringbom’s study on the acquisition of English by Finnish-speaking and Swedish-speaking Finns proved this to be true. Also, as stated earlier, Odlin (1989) identified language distance as a factor that affects transfer, and found it to be a major determinant of the amount of time students will need in order to become highly proficient in the target language. Looking at the cumulative effects of cross-linguistic similarities and differences on the acquisition process, the Foreign Service Institute (1985) of the U.S. State Department came up with an interesting classification of the length of time needed to achieve a high degree of mastery of a foreign language. While English-speakers were considered to need 20 weeks of intensive 15
30 hours per week tuition to learn German, the time needed to learn Finnish was found to be over twice as long, 44 weeks (figures from Ringbom, 1987). Singleton (1987) came to the conclusion that psychotypological factors seem to interact with a proficiency factor and an uncertainty factor. His case study of Philip, a beginning adult learner of French, whose native language was English and who had previously also acquired some Irish, Latin and Spanish, showed that Philip privileged English and Spanish as sources of lexical borrowings into French. The association with Spanish seemed to be stronger, which Singleton sees as proof of a strong psychotypological dimension and of differentiation and selectivity in multilingual lexical acquisition and processing. As seen above, despite the arguably evident role of the mother tongue in second language acquisition, it is not the only language affecting the outcome of the acquisition process. It has been proved that several years of study stud y of one foreign language can greatly reduce the time needed to acquire a similar language.
2.4.2.4 Production
As stated earlier, researchers seem to agree on the existence of negative and positive transfer. While positive transfer transfer is seen to occur when the first language, or other previously acquired languages to that matter, aid the acquisition of the target language, it has not been given as much attention as negative transfer. Odlin (1989) identifies four types of negative transfer, namely, underproduction, overproduction, production errors and misinterpretation. Underproduction is what is often seen as avoidance due to language distance and occurs when the learner produces very few or no examples of a target language structure. Experiments by Schachter (1974) among Chinese and Japanese students of English showed they systematically avoided using relative clauses in English, largely due to this feature being absent or structurally very different in their native language. Overproduction is what can often result from underproduction, namely relating to our previous example the avoidance of relative clauses leads into the use of too many simple sentences. As production errors Odlin (1989) names substitutions, calques and 16
alternations of structures. According to him, substitutions involve the use of native language forms in the target language production, and are therefore what is often seen as borrowing. Calques are errors that reflect a native language structure structure and often do so very closely and alternations of structures are seen for example in hypercorrections, hypercorrections, which can be overreactions to a particular influence from the first language. Misinterpretation is what Odlin (1989) sees as the influence of the first language structures in the interpretation interpretation of target language messages. This may m ay also occur when word order patterns of the two languages differ.
2.5 Cross-linguistic Influence on the Lexicon Cross-linguistic influence on the lexicon is often more obvious and easier to notice than influence on grammar. It is obvious that the native language is a factor in learning target language vocabulary, and that closely related languages often share much more cognate vocabulary with one another than distant languages do. This is backed up by Sjöholm’s (1976) study, where he found Finnish-speakers to have more difficulty with English vocabulary than Swedish-speakers. Swedish-speakers. Closely related languages do not, however, only show positive transfer in lexical semantics but can also lead into difficulty. The most obvious difficulty being so called “false friends” or “false cognates”, cognates”, when a word form in one language is identical or very similar to a word form in another language but the meanings differ. These false friends can also be partial and share a meaning which is acceptable in some contexts but not in others. An example of false friends is the word indeed a chef but in German a
boss
chef ,
which in English means a cook or
or a chief . Cognates are not necessarily identical in
form but there is a formal cross-linguistic similarity similarity between items with varying semantic relationship. Ringbom (1987) divides cognates into three groups according to their semantic distance. He identifies cognates with a similar form but a wholly different meaning, like for example the Swedish word fabrik meaning factory, which can be falsely linked with the English word fabric. The second group of cognates are similar in form but do not have an identical meaning in every context. As an example he gives the 17
sentence “The next day we Swedish verb
grunda,
grounded a
meaning
to found .
club”, where
grounded is
derived from the
As a third example he gives cognates which
have an identical or near-identical meaning in some, but not all contexts, like for example the Swedish word hund , which in general means dog but occasionally also hound .
Type of transfer
Underlying cause
Transfer of From which Example form or language meaning
A+B
Language switch & coinage
Form (results in non-existing TL word)
C
Totally or partially deceptive cognate
D
Semantic extension of single lexical units
Insufficient awareness of intended linguistic form, instead of which (a modified form of) an L2 word is used Awareness of an existing TL form, but confusion caused by formal similarity to a word in another language Awareness of existing TL form, but not of semantic restrictions
E
Calques of multi-word units (compounds, phrasal verbs, idioms)
L1 or L2 (also from languages not very well known by learner)
Form L1 or L2 (results in existing TL word)
Meaning
Awareness of Meaning existing TL units but not of relevant semantic/ collocational restrictions
The hillow was hidden in the cupboard (Fin. hillo = “jam”) We had a large number of bulls and several cups of tea (Swe. bulle = “bun”)
L1 or, occasionally, very advanced L2 proficiency
He bit himself in the language (Fin. kieli = both “tongue” and “language”) L1 or My uncile possibly never married: very he remained a advanced L2 youngman all proficiency his life (Swe. ungkarl = “bachelor”)
Table 2.1: Lexical transfer errors: Form versus meaning (adapted from Ringbom (2001, Table 4.2, p. 64)).
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In addition to cognates different types of cross-linguistic influence on lexicon have been identified. Cenoz, Hufeisen and Jessner (2002) describe words that differ from a target word at only one letter position as “neighbours” and find them to be activated relatively easy. Such words would are for example wind, bind, kind, wand, wild and wink . Cenoz, Hufeisen and Jessner (2002) do, however, remark that even when languages are relatively closely related and are represented by the same script 4, words may contain language specific cues, such as onset capitals for German nouns, which might reduce the number of competitors of an item to those of the target language. Language distance again plays a role in lexical distance and in the number of neighbour words, with the amount decreasing as the distance increases. Odlin (1989) defines borrowing transfer as referring to the influence a second language has on a previously acquired language, which usually is the first language. A common example of this is the French word
croissant ,
commonly used by English-
speakers to describe a certain pastry. When talking about cross-linguistic influence borrowing is, however, also commonly used for the reversed phenomena of using a first language or another non-native language word in the target language production in an unmodified form. Odlin also mentions the notion of lexical universals, mainly in the form of approximations. These are similar to overextension and often result from metaphoric coinages that function instead of the accepted target language form, as for example the approximation
air ball,
correct English word
used by speakers of various native languages instead of the
balloon.
Ringbom (1987) considers these approximations to occur
when semantic properties of one item are transferred in a combination of lexical items. Ringbom (1987) distinguishes between borrowing and lexical transfer. According to him, borrowing covers hybrids, blends and relexifications as well as complete language shift, which is what is often meant by borrowing. Unlike in complete language shift, where an item is taken to the target language production in an unmodified form, hybrids, blends and relexifications occur when an item is modified morphologically or phonologically to a target language-like norm. This phenomenon will be discussed in more detail under the present study. Lexical transfer then again occurs when the learner 4
By scripts Cenoz, Hufeisen and Jessner (2002) mean orthographic, lexical and sublexical representations.
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assumes an identity of semantic structure between his first language and the target language word. According to Ringbom (1987) lexical transfer can occur in forms of loan translations, semantic extensions and cognates, which are often also called false friends. Sjöholm (1976) and Ringbom (1987) point out an example utterance by a Finnish learner of English, who said He bit himself in the language meaning to say He bit tongue.
himself in the
This can be explained by the multiple meanings of the Finnish word kieli, which
is used both for tongue and language. This phenomenon is known as semantic extension and occurs when semantic properties are extended to the target language word. Lexical transfer can also occur when there is no morphological similarity between words that appear to be semantically equivalent. Ringbom (2001) identifies transfer of form to be more common across related languages but transfer of semantic patterns and word combinations to nearly always be based on the first language, even if there is no close relation between the languages. This was backed up by the results of his experiments, where Finnish-speaking students produced lexical transfer from their second language Swedish in their third language production of English. Murphy states that lexical transfer distinguishes between content and function words5. Whereas transfer of content words is often seen as a strategy to fill a gap, highly frequent lexical L1 items, usually function words, are often transferred unintentionally. Odlin (1989) sees code-switching among bilinguals as intentional, augmentative and focussed with complete syntactic structures for the language switches, but as Ringbom (1986) puts it, lexical transfer during second language acquisition is normally unintentional and involves short, complete, non-adapted L1 words, which are usually function words. Ringbom (1986) also proposes that semantic transfer involving content words tends to be more based on the first language, whereas second language lexical transfer, especially in unmodified form, is limited to function words. Stedje (1977) examined recordings of Finnish learners of German as a third language with Swedish as a second language and similarly to Ringbom’s point of view found that function words were predominantly transferred from the second language and not from the first language. 5
Content words include nouns, verbs, numerals, adjectives and adverbs. Function words include prepositions, conjunctions, determiners and pronouns.
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It is highly likely that psychotypology has played a key role in this as Swedish uses function words in a similar manner to German. The idea that L2 function word transfer is facilitated by typological closeness is also supported by Cenoz (2001), who found that her subjects transfer nearly seven times as many function words from Spanish as from Basque when speaking English. Hammarberg (1998) studied a native English speaker, who also had advanced knowledge of German, acquiring Swedish in Sweden. Hammarberg found his subject to consciously use her native English language in metalinguistic comments to ask how something is expressed in Swedish when she encountered difficulty and to intentionally incorporate L1 lexical items to fill a knowledge gap in her L3 Swedish. Ringbom’s argument also held in this study, where the subject was found to use unintended language switches, which usually occurred in the form of L2 German prepositions. Poulisse and Bongaerts (1994) focus particularly on content versus function words in unintentional language switches. They interpret the amount of repair used both during and after the utterance to show that content word transfer is much more monitored, but that the unintended switches are usually function words. Furthermore, Poulisse and Bongaerts state that the L1 function words are hardly ever morphologically or phonologically adapted to the L2. They attribute this phenomenon not only to the frequency effect but also to the relationship between proficiency and attention and reason that when a learner has low L2 proficiency, he allocates most of his conscious attention to meaning and focuses more on content words, which leads to more errors with function words, whose short length requires less effort to encode and articulate. articulate. Code-mixing, which is generally meant by the use of both the L1 and L2 in the construction of the same sentence, and code-switching, which Odlin (1989) defines as the alternative use of the L1 and L2 within a discourse, are examples of communication transfer. Translation and borrowing can also be grouped under the same category, as they are all strategies learners use mainly to overcome problems in communication.
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2.6 Cross-linguistic Influence on Grammar When learning a new language, despite some claims, we clearly do not start from scratch and learn it the same way we acquired our first language. In the early days of acquisition, the grammatical structures, such as sentence forms and the number, gender and case patterns, of the native language tend to be transferred to the target language. The learner, however, is unaware of the effect of cross-linguistic influence, and usually does not realise the presence of transfer. Distribution seems to be one of the features that are transferred from the first language. When for example in English we say
new houses,
the plural does not show in
the adjective. German and Finnish then again handle this differently, both languages adding the plural indication into the adjective as in this example
neue Häuser and uudet
talot respectively.
For learners of English as a second language one of the most common difficulties seems to be the third person “s” and its behaviour in different contexts. Sentences like She speaks English
do not generally seem to cause major difficulty but the omission of
“s” in sentences like Can she speak English then again do (Ellis, 1985). 1 985). German-speaking learners occasionally have difficulty in using the equivalents of separable German verbs in English. An example of such a verb is the German verb
anrufen, the use of which can
be seen in example (i): (i)
Ich rufe dich an. *I will call you on. I will call you.
Grammatical features can be expressed through different media in different languages. While English signals the indirect object by word order, Finnish does so by inflection. For example, in the English sentence
the man gave you the book ,
the position
you tells the receiver of the book. By changing the word order of this sentence, we also of you
change the recipient. In the Finnish sentence
mies antoi kirjan sinulle,
the recipient is
signalled by an inflectional ending, and while a change of word order may bring 22
additional pragmatic emphasis to the sentence, it does not affect the basic meaning of the sentence. While many researchers (Odlin 1989, Zoble 1986) argue that basic word order does not seem to be influenced cross-linguistically, inflection is one area of grammar where native speakers of languages, which regularly use inflection, seem to have an advantage in learning a second language which also uses inflection, at least in the early stages of acquisition. Acquiring the grammatical gender of the target language can be greatly aided if the learner’s first language features grammatical gender as well. Therefore, a Frenchspeaker would find it relatively easy to use Spanish gender, both languages employing a similar gender division. Finnish-speaking learner can be seen slightly handicapped in this area because Finnish does not generally feature grammatical gender. Similarly, if the learner’s first language uses prepositions and articles, he will find it easier to understand the possible corresponding features of the target language. Odlin (1989), however, argues that errors such as omitting articles, copulas and other forms often seem to involve simplification rather than transfer. The transferability of word order has been argued with some researchers researchers finding it to be rigidly a transferable property and others doubting the cross-linguistic importance of it. Granfors and Palmberg (1976, cf. Odlin 1989) found numerous word order errors in the production of native Finnish-speakers learning English. The Finnish-speakers were especially found to have some difficulty with relative clauses as they produced fewer instances of resumptive pronouns as well as fewer positions of direct objects, indirect objects and prepositional objects. This was seen to be due to Finnish not allowing pronominal retention. Tarallo and Myhill (1983, cf. Odlin 1989) then again argue against this and claim that the use of resumptive pronouns does not indicate transfer. They had studied native English-speakers studying German, a language which doesn’t use resumptive pronouns, and found that the English-speakers often accepted ungrammatical sentences with such pronouns to be correct. Odlin among others believes that typological factors affect the likelihood of transfer. This was previously seen in the use of resumptive pronouns but has also been studied in great deal in preverbal negation. The use of preverbal and postverbal negation is seen as an important clue to relations between transfer and universals in second
23
language acquisition. Different languages show fundamental differences between word order and negation. The negator does not even have to be an independent word but can be indicated in prefixes or suffixes. However, negation is not necessarily transferred or only some forms of it may be transferred. transferred. The general belief among researchers is that morphemes are more likely to be transferred from the first language if they are free rather than bound (Kellerman 1983). Jarvis and Odlin (2000) argue against this and suggest that bound morphemes can be transferred not just by the means of negative transfer but can have a facilitative effect on second language acquisition, especially between typologically close languages such as Finnish and Estonian.
2.7 Avoidance: Cleverly Hidden or Accidentally Left out? The notion of avoidance was briefly mentioned in connection to underproduction. Although this topic is often ignored, it is widely believed that avoidance is purely a conscious way of bypassing problems. Learners develop strategic skills in order to compensate for their lack of knowledge or availability. One of these strategies is to avoid using words and constructions the learner does not know. Scovel (2000) describes avoidance as the tendency for L2 learners not to use grammatical structures that native speakers would normally use in that context because those L2 structures contrast significantly with the grammar of their mother tongue. Avoidance is often also classified as a communication strategy, where the use of structures which have not yet been acquired is avoided. Because avoidance results in fewer errors being made by learners in speech and writing, it is obviously difficult for second language acquisition researchers to accurately measure this phenomenon. Although it is somewhat possible to trace avoidance in translation tasks, it can be extremely difficult to measure avoidance in free production.
24
According to Odlin (1989), there is clear evidence that avoidance behaviours sometimes arise from taboos in the native language. Pragmatic matters, matters, such as politeness and apologiness, may also lead into difficulties if the learner uses a routine acceptable in the native language but not in the target language. As stated in Doughty and Long (2003), as an alternative to avoidance, native language euphemisms and related speech acts may sometimes be translated translated in order to get around taboos.
2.8 “Foreign Talk” and Interlanguage Transfer The terms “foreign talk” and “foreign language mode” are used in connection to learners who have previous non-native language knowledge and are acquiring an additional L3. The so-called “foreign talk” mode can be described in the words of Williams and Hammarberg (1998) as a desire to suppress L1 as being “non-foreign” and to rely rather on a prior L2 as a strategy to approach L3. The learner perceives the L2 as a more appropriate source of transfer due to its status as a foreign language, and therefore the features of the native language are often seen as an incorrect choice. Speakers of a native language do not suddenly become speakers of another language. Acquiring a language is a process, which includes making hypotheses in respect of the target language and adjusting these hypotheses according to the learner’s general knowledge of languages. At any particular moment, the language student is located on an interlanguage continuum between the native language and the target language (Selinker, 1972). Truly successful students make the journey to a high level of competency in the target language, while less successful students become fossilized somewhere along the interlanguage continuum (Brown, 1993). When a third language comes into the picture, the acquisition process becomes more complex. It has been suggested that the acquisition mechanism for L2 is different from that used for L1 acquisition and therefore that it is more likely that the L2-type mechanism is reactivated in L3 production (Williams and Hammarberg, 1998). This is closely related to what De Angelis and Selinker (2001) describe as interlanguage transfer; the influence of a non-native language on the acquisition or use of another non-native 25
language. Therefore interlanguage transfer can only occur in third language acquisition, when there are a minimum of three linguistic systems present. Some researchers (De Angelis and Selinker, 2001) argue that whereas semantic and pragmatic transfer tend to be from the native language, other type of transfer generally favours interlanguage. Such division cannot, however, be blindly trusted. If the learner is highly proficient in an additional foreign language, this language can also be the source of some semantic and pragmatic transfer. Also, it is very likely that language distance once again is a strong determinant of the source of transfer.
2.9 Concluding Summary It has become clear that cross-linguistic influence plays a major role in second language acquisition. There are numerous factors, which can determine the likelihood of language transfer, and after carefully reviewing past literature, it can be said that language distance, or psychotypology, seems to be one of the most influential factors. We live in a world where learning two or more languages in no longer exceptional and therefore researchers have in recent years become more and more interested in third language acquisition and in the influence additional languages have on the acquisition of a new language. When talking about psychotypology and cross-linguistic influence, influence, it is important not only to concentrate on the learner’s native language but to take any additional languages the learner may have acquired into consideration as well as learners may be more likely to borrow from a language they actively use than other languages they know but do not use (Cenoz, Hufeisen and Jessner, 2001). Bearing in mind that proficiency and psychotypology influence the choice of source language, it is often the most recently acquired language from which borrowing occurs. Cenoz, Hufeisen and Jessner (2001) regard recency as an important factor and state that an L2 is activated more easily if the speaker has used it recently and thus maintained easy access to it. It is commonly believed that cross-linguistic influence is more frequent in lexis, phonology and discourse than grammar and although Cenoz, Hufeisen and Jessner (2001)
26
claim that L2 transfer does not occur in discourse, it has become obvious that language transfer occurs at all linguistic levels. Third language acquisition has experienced important development in recent years with researchers like Cenoz, Hufeisen, Jessner and Singleton paying increasing attention to this area. Cross-linguistic influence influence is a phenomenon linking second and third language acquisition and should continue to be of interest and importance in the future research.
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Chapter 3 Five Languages In order to shed light on the discussion of the sources of cross-linguistic influence in this study and the relationship between the three main languages involved, namely English, Finnish and German, and the two additional languages, Swedish and Irish, a brief account of these languages will be given. Finnish is a non-Indo-European language and is a member of the Finno-Ugric language group. Other Finno-Ugrian languages are Estonian, Hungarian, Lapp and some minority languages spoken in Russia. The one that is closest to Finnish is Estonian. Finnish has a notorious reputation of being a very difficult language to learn. The reason why adult learners often regard Finnish to be difficult is because it is relatively distant from any other language. Distant, or structurally different should we say, languages are often seen as more “difficult” than languages that are related to the learner’s native language or other languages the learner might have acquired before. The lexical and grammatical features of Finnish are relatively different from English and German. The morphological difference between Finnish and English is obvious. Whereas English has independent words like prepositions, pronouns, auxiliaries and adverbs, Finnish makes use of case endings, verb endings, possessive suffixes or enclitic particles. Therefore in Finnish, a word is a more important semantic and grammatical unit than in Germanic languages. The absence of gender and articles is one of the most striking differences. Even the third person singular has no gender, both the English she and he and the German sie and er are expressed with the same word
hän
in
Finnish. Personal possession is expressed with suffixes and prepositions with postpositions. Contemporary English has essentially only two cases, nominative and genitive, and German has four, nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. Finnish, however, has fifteen grammatical cases, which have their own endings. Finnish is typologically an agglutinative language in which grammatical markers and endings are joined to a word stem. Due to the structure of the language words are often long. To give 28
an example of how Finnish endings work, consider the word autoissanikinko, which has the root
auto,
meaning a
car .
The i is a plural marker and
ssa
which in this example corresponds to the English preposition singular possessive suffix, a counterpart for the English
an inessive case ending, in. ni
my. kin
is a first person
is an enclitic particle
meaning also or too and ko is a particle indicating that a question is being asked. So, the combination auto+i+ssa+ni+kin+ko translates to
[Do you mean] in my cars, too?
German equivalent phrase is formed similarly with English Meinst du,
The
in meinen Autos
auch? Morphologically Finnish and German have more in common. Both
languages form
new words through composition, simply by joining already existing ones together or through word derivation, by adding suffixes. Finnish is one of the few languages which have a phonetic feature called vowel harmony; this means that in a non-compound word, the back vowels a, o, u do not appear in a word which contains any of the front vowels ä, ö or y. It should also be pointed
out that Finnish has no real equivalent to the verb have.
These three languages also differ in syntax. Word order is often said to be free in Finnish. The word order of a sentence can usually be changed in several ways without changing the basic meaning of the sentence, however, the emphasis on side meanings or style typically changes. Because of the remarkable presence of inflectional grammar in Finnish, a certain freedom of word order exists which is lacking in English. English typically uses a strict subject-verb-object (SVO) order in simple sentences and does not allow free changes in word order. There are also a number of English sentence structures that reflect non-SVO word orders, like questions, sentences with relative clauses, and sentences with infinitives, participles and gerunds, to name a few. German word order rules can be placed somewhere between the Finnish and the English ones. In German sentences, word order is both more variable and more flexible than in English, however, German does not allow the order to be changed quite as freely as Finnish does. do es. One of the biggest differences in German compared to the other two languages is the word order in subordinate clauses. A German subordinate clause always starts with a subordinating conjunction and ends with the conjugated verb. If the subordinate clause comes before the main clause, the very first word after the comma has to be the verb in the main clause. Compound verbs, which are often split in two parts in German sentences, cause some
29
difficulty for the L2 German learners of both English and Finnish, as this kind of verbal behaviour is not present in either one of o f these languages. Swedish, like English and German, is also a Germanic language and can be considered to be quite similar to both of these languages. Although Swedish and German lexical features are often perceived far more similar to one another than English lexical features to either one of these languages, they are all clearly closely related. Swedish uses articles and inflects nouns in nominative and genitive case. Grammatical gender is also present in Swedish. Similarly like German, a number of nouns form plural with umlaut; the vowel of the syllable before the suffix is changed. Like in English, prepositions in Swedish work as stand-alone words, but can interact somewhat more with verbs than they usually can in English. Similarly like in German, prepositions can be attached as a prefix to a verb, modifying the verb so that the noun phrase that would have been governed by the preposition instead becomes a direct object of the verb. However, the meaning of the verb can be altered as part of this process, so it is can reasonably be argued that this is not an action of the preposition itself, but rather a derivation of a new compound word which has a preposition and a verb as its components. Swedish syntax does not differ from English syntax in great deal, however, Swedish sentences often use inverted word order, placing the verb before the subject to indicate questions, conditionals and consecutives. Inverted word order is also used when the sentence starts with an adverbial or when any object of the verb is placed at the front of the sentence Irish is also an Indo-European language and has the same inherited grammatical categories as other languages of the same family, such as nouns, verbs and prepositions. Nouns have masculine or feminine gender and are inflected in nominative/accusative, genitive, dative and vocative cases. In addition to the usual parts of speech, Irish also uses a sub-class of nouns called verbal nouns, which are used in prepositional phrases. Instead of infinitive form, each verb has an associated verbal noun, generally based on the same root, which is for example used to fill the functions of the infinitive. As a member of the Celtic language family, Irish is not closely related to any of the other four languages involved in this study.
30
Chapter 4 The Present Study: Background 4.1 Aims The study I carried out was a quantitative cross-sectional study and the tests were done in a classroom environment. My aim was to study cross-linguistic influence on native English and native Finnish L2 learners of German. As both groups had previously acquired additional languages, my interest was not restricted to only studying the influence of the learners’ native language but also the influence of other previously acquired languages and therefore it could be said that the students in both groups were actually L3 learners of German. Because Finnish is a non-Indo-European language, which is in no way related to German, I was expecting the Finnish students rather to use their knowledge of English and Swedish, both of which are Indo-European languages and also members of the Germanic language group, as their source of transfer. I wasn’t expecting the Irish students to use their knowledge of Irish in a significant way, but rather to transfer from their native language English.
4.2 Methodology The test was divided into two parts. The first part was an error-recognition test, where students were given example sentences, some of which were correct and some incorrect. The students were asked to mark the incorrect sentences and to underline the part of the sentence, which they believed to be incorrect. They were also asked to suggest a corrected version of the sentence. The second part was a translation from their native language into the target language German. The translation was approximately 80 words
31
long. The time allowed for each of the two parts was ten minutes. I was first thinking of replacing the translation test with a spontaneous writing test, asking the students to write a short essay on a given topic. However, as the test time was only ten minutes, I suspected the outcome of the essays might vary a great deal from student to student, as some would require more time to think about the storyline than others. Previous research has also shown that translation tasks tend to result in more cross-linguistic influence than tasks that call for free composition (Ringbom, 1987). Therefore I came to the conclusion it would be better to give both groups the same text to translate.
4.3 Test Groups I studied two groups of students, a group of native English speakers and a group of native Finnish speakers. The first of the two groups I studied was a group of 17 approximately 18 year-old first year university students in Ireland, all of whom were native speakers of English and one bilingual speaker of English and German. They had also been studying Irish in school. The second group was 18 approximately 18 year-old final year secondary school students in Finland, all of whom were native speakers of Finnish. The Finnish-speaking students had all previously learned English and Swedish.
32
English-speaking students Finnish-speaking students Sex Age No of years Sex Age No of years studying studying German German
F M F M F F M M F F M M M F M F F
18,5 20 18 18 19 18 18 20 19 20 19 19 20 18 18 18 18
6 4 7 6 6 6,5 6 8 8 6 7 5 20 6 6 6 4
M M M F F F F F F F F F F F F F F M
18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 19
4 5 2,5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 3 5 5 5 5 2.5 3
Mean
Mean
Mean
Mean
Mean
Mean
9F=53% 8M =47%
18.7
6.9
14F=78% 4M=22%
18.1
4.4
Table 4.1: Participants in the present study (sex, age and the number of o f years the subjects have been learning German)
4.4 Problems With the limited time of ten minutes, some of the students were not able to fully complete the translation task. The group of Finnish speakers seemed to have more difficulty to complete the test in time and there are several factors which may have influenced this. The test situation was timed rather unfavourably for the Finnish speakers. The students took the test at 8am on a Monday morning, which might have had negative influence on their motivation. Another motivational factor that played a role in this test was the level
33
of education. Whereas the English speakers were university students, the Finnish speakers were secondary school students, who typically are not necessarily quite as motivated to study as the third level students. These two factors may have had an influence on the students’ motivation to succeed in the test. Another problem I faced was my lack of knowledge of the Irish language. Irish is also an Indo-European language, like English and German, but as it is a member of the Celtic language group, I did not expect it to largely influence the English-speaking students German production. Irish has very different lexical and grammatical features compared to English and I expected it not to have influenced the production of the Irish students very much. One more factor to be taken into consideration before the test results can be compared is the level of German the students have acquired up to now. The Irish students had studied German for approximately 7 years but the Finnish students only about 4.5 years. For the Irish students, German was their L3, whereas for the Finnish students it was their L4.
4.5 Concluding Summary This chapter described the methodology used in the present study. Both error-recognition and translation were used as methods for collecting data. All the data collected was written data. Because the two groups had a slight difference in the level of their L2 knowledge, the amount of cross-linguistic influence could not be directly compared without considering the factors affecting it, such as learner’s age, proficiency and background. However, it was possible to make interesting interesting hypotheses of the source languages of transfer and the way in which the students were incorporating the influence in their production of L2 German. The following section discusses the results of these tests.
34
Chapter 5 Analysis of the Present Study: Results and Discussion In this section I will explain the outcome of the tests. First I will give an overview of all the mistakes the students made and will then move onto analysing the possible crosslinguistic influence on these mistakes. I will consider both lexical and grammatical transfer and give some insight into why transfer might have happened in most cases.
5.1 Overall mistakes The starting point for the analysis was to mark all the errors that occurred in the L2 production. These errors were categorised into ten different groups; wrong words, missing words, wrong endings, wrong articles, wrong prepositions, wrong personal pronouns, wrong verb forms, wrong word order, spelling mistakes and style errors. Style errors were considered to include non-use of compound article-preposition combinations, like in dem, which should combine into im, as well as use of words which are not entirely wrong but the meaning of which is too strong in the target language compared to the source language, like for example
love
and
like
relationship. Some interesting findings
can be done from the mistake tables. The overall length of the L2 production seemed to be somewhat longer for the Irish students. This could be explained by the higher proficiency in L2 German among the Irish students. The Irish students seemed to make remarkably more style mistakes, most of them relating to a wrong choice of verb. The percentage of overall mistakes made by the Finnish-speaking students seems rather high. This is due to the high number of missing words in the Finnish-speaking students’ L2 German production. As can be seen from tables 4 and 5, 5 , if the missing words are ignored, 35
the error percentages of the English-speaking and the Finnish-speaking students are closer to one another.
36
Student (L1 Finnish)
Total Wrong Missing Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong Spelling Style Total words words words endings articles prep. pers. verb word mistakes errors mistakes pron. forms order %
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
76 10 81 71 77 32 36 77 53 73 73 70 65 45 18 45 75 0
5
10
8
1
9 1 3
9 5 3 4 4 3 8 4 1 1 4 6
5 2 1
6 5
5 7 11 44 41 8 32 9 2 8 14 38 51 39 11
Mean
Mean
60.4
3.3
1 1 5 5 4 4 4
3 4 3 1
2
2
4
2 2
3 1 3
2 1 3 2 2 1 2 2 1 2
1 2 1 2
1 2 2
4 8
1 3
1 3 5
Mean Mean
Mean
Mean
Mean
Mean
20.6
4.5
1.3
1.6
1.1
1 1 1 1
6 3 2 2
6 3 3
43.4% 3 2
58.0% 35.2% 39.0% 153.1% 155.6% 29.9% 115.1% 26.0% 17.8% 30.0% 61.5% 126.7% 311.1% 137.8% 48.0%
1
3 3 7 3 2 4 10 5 2 5 3
Mean
Mean Mean
Mean
Mean
Mean
1.6
0.7
4.1
0.6
86.8%
1 1 1
2
1
1 1 1
Table 5.1: Overall mistakes made by the Finnish-speaking students in the second p art of the test (translation). Total mistakes were calculated calculated as a percentage of mistakes per word. The mean figures were calculated as mistakes made in a particular area per student. (Two students did not complete the translation test and therefore only 16 students’ results were considered meaningful.)
37
Student Total Wrong Missing Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong Spelling Style Total (L1 words words words endings articles prep. pers. verb word mistakes errors mistakes English) pron. forms order %
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
93 85 80 85 93 86 87 86 87 66 85 86 92 83 83 74 83
1 4 1 5 2 3 5 4 6 3 4 4 5 2 5 5
1 1 1 3 1 23 1 1 3 13 6
4 4 1 5 3 4 1 3 9 6 3 3
2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 3 1 2 2
1 1 2 1 1 4 1 2 1 3 2 1
1 1 1 4 3 2 1 1 2
3 1
2
2
1 1 2
1
5 1 1
3
2 4 5 6
1 2 1
4 2 2 2 1 2 7 1 2 4 6 1
1 3 1 1 2 1 2 1 1 2 1
2.0% 15.3% 12.5% 4.7% 24.7% 12.8% 14.9% 23.3% 12.6% 69.7% 21.2% 15.1% 15.2% 28.9% 28.9% 52.7% 31.3%
Student Total Wrong Missing Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong Spelling Style Total (L1 words words words endings articles prep. pers. verb word mistakes errors mistakes English) pron. forms order %
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
93 85 80 85 93 86 87 86 87 66 85 86 92 83 83 74 83
1
Mean
84.4
4 1 5 2 3 5 4 6 3 4 4 5 2 5 5
1 1 1 3 1 23 1
4 4 1 5
1 3 13 6
3 4 1 3 9 6 3 3
Mean
Mean Mean
Mean
3.5
3.2
2.7
2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 3 1 2 2
1 1 1
1 1 2 1 1 4 1 2 1 3 2 1
2
4 3 2 1 1
4 2 2 2 1 2 7 1
1 1 2
1
5 1 1
3
1 2 1
2 4 6 1
1 3 1 1 2 1 2 1 1 2
2.0% 15.3% 12.5% 4.7% 24.7% 12.8% 14.9% 23.3% 12.6% 69.7% 21.2% 15.1% 15.2% 28.9% 28.9% 52.7% 31.3%
3 1
2
2 4 5 6
Mean
Mean
Mean
Mean Mean
Mean
Mean
Mean
Mean
1.2
1.4
0.9
1.9
0.5
2.1
0.9
22.8%
2
1
Table 5.2: Overall mistakes made by the English-speaking students in the second part of the test (translation). Total mistakes were calculated calculated as a percentage of mistakes per word. The mean figures were calculated as mistakes made in a particular area per student.
38
Student (L1 Finnish)
Total words
Total Mistakes
Total Mistakes %
1 2* 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
76 10 81 71 77 32 36 77 53 73 73 70 65 45 18
23 0 43 18 19 5 15 13 29 10 11 13 26 19 5
30.3% 53.1% 25.4% 24.7% 15.6% 41.7% 16.9% 54.7% 13.7% 15.1% 18.6% 40.0% 42.2% 27.8%
Student (L1 Finnish)
Total words
Total Mistakes
Total Mistakes %
1 2* 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18*
76 10 81 71 77 32 36 77 53 73 73 70 65 45 18 45 75 0
23 0 43 18 19 5 15 13 29 10 11 13 26 19 5 23 25 0
30.3% 53.1% 25.4% 24.7% 15.6% 41.7% 16.9% 54.7% 13.7% 15.1% 18.6% 40.0% 42.2% 27.8% 51.1% 33.3% Mean
60.4
18.6
31.5%
Table 5.3: Overall mistakes made by the Finnish-speaking students in the second part of the test (translation). Missing words were not considered as mistakes in this table. Total mistakes were calculated as a percentage of mistakes per word. * Two students’ production was too short to be analysed and therefore their results from the translation part were not considered in the total results.
39
Student (L1 English)
Total words
Total Mistakes
Total Mistakes %
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
93 85 80 85 93 86 87 86 87 66 85 86 92 83 83 74 83
2 12 9 4 23 10 10 19 11 23 17 13 12 23 21 26 20
2.2% 14.1% 11.3% 4.7% 24.7% 11.6% 11.5% 22.1% 12.6% 34.8% 20.0% 15.1% 13.0% 27.7% 25.3% 35.1% 24.1% Mean
84.4
15
18.2%
Table 5.4: Overall mistakes made by the English-speaking students in the second part of the test (translation). Missing words were not considered as mistakes in this table. Total mistakes were calculated as a percentage of mistakes per word.
40
5.2 Cross-Linguistic Influence: Finnish-speaking Students While all the errors in the L2 learners’ production cannot be counted as transfer, a high number of them do seem to imply that another language - the learner’s native language or another L2 the learner has acquired – has influenced the production process. In this study, I was expecting some transfer but was surprised with the amount of lexical transfer in the production of the Finnish-speaking students. I will first analyse the production of the Finnish students and then go on to analyse that of the Irish. Finally I compare the results with one another and also with some previous work in this field. As already stated earlier, Finnish is not related to German and therefore I was expecting the possible transfer in the production of the Finnish-speaking L2 German learners to come from the two Germanic languages, Swedish and English, both of which the students had previously acquired. With this in mind, I started to analyse the lexicon and to my great surprise, found a large number of words, which I believed to have been influenced by other languages.
5.2.1 Lexicon Many studies have shown non-native language influence to be common and frequent in lexical level. Psychotypology, the learner’s perceptual view on the distance between the relevant languages seems to be important. Larger distances between unrelated languages may cause learner to be unable to make use of his L1 and therefore to rely on his knowledge of another L2 related to the target language. In this section I will be using the terms “relexification” and “hybrid” as Ringbom (1987) describes them and the term “borrowing” as he describes complete language shift.
41
5.2.1.1 Borrowing
Borrowing happens when the search for a lexical item activates a word in L1 or previously acquired non-native language and this item is taken over into the L2 in an unmodified form (Ringbom, 1987). This is the difference between lexical transfer and borrowing, which is also called complete language shift. Transfer takes place primarily from the learner’s first language, regardless of its’ distance to the target language, while borrowing takes place from a language related to the target language. In this study, the Finnish students did not seem to use their native language Finnish as the source of borrowing, but rather to borrow from Swedish or English. Eight out of the 16 Finnishspeaking students who completed the translation test used borrowing in their L2 German production. Borrowing from English or Swedish occurred 15 times in 13 different words, which were Mathematics, Ingenjör ,
Ocean, Rum, simmar , Espanja, near , gärna, will,
Familj, University, landet and men.
When the borrowed word was a noun, it was with
one exception changed to start with a capital letter; a feature, which German, unlike Swedish, English or Finnish, requires. The word
Universitet can
be classified under two
categories; on one hand it clearly looks like it has been borrowed from Swedish but on the other hand, it could be argued that it has been phonetically influenced by Finnish. I will consider both possibilities below. The words, which seemed as they had been borrowed from English were Mathematics, Ocean, near , will, university
and
University.
are close to their German counterparts
The English words
mathematics
and
die Mathematik and die Universität in
their written form and could have therefore caused the language shift to take place. Ocean
is similar to the German word
der Ozean
but in this case the search triggered a
slightly wrong meaning. The word which was expected to occur was das Meer or die See, which both have the English meaning sea, not ocean. The semantic representations of an ocean and a sea are, however, close to one another and it may have been the case that the learner could not find the right word and therefore chose to use a word with a very similar meaning. Instead of near the expression in der Nähe was expected to occur. The Nähe is somewhat similar to that of near but interestingly the student did not spelling of Nähe
choose to use the Swedish word
nära,
which is not only phonologically but also 42
phonetically close to the German target word. The use of will instead of wird , the first person singular form of werden, can be explained not only in terms of complete language shift but also with its role in German. The word
will
but it has a different meaning to that of English
does indeed also occur in German
will.
German
will
is the third person
singular form of the verb wollen meaning to want . Swedish seemed to be the source of borrowing bor rowing for six words. These were Ingenjör, Rum, simmar, gärna, Familj, Fa milj, landet and men. The German word der Ingenieur , meaning
engineer, caused a lot of difficulty in this test and a number of students misspelled it. Only one student borrowed the word
ingenjör
from Swedish. Other students were
influenced with Swedish or English forms of the same word but these cases will be discussed later on. Rum is a borrowing from Swedish and is yet again very similar to that of German schwimmen
der Raum
meaning
and English
room.
to swim
The verb
simmar is
relatively similar to German
and the high resemblance could have caused the
activation of a wrong language. To express willingness one student used the Swedish word gärna, an obvious mix up with the German word similarity between the German word familj,
die Familie
gern.
Even more obvious is the
meaning family and the Swedish word
which was used by three students. On the look out for the expression
Land , in the country,
one student used the mixed expression
aus landet ,
auf dem
which has a
German preposition but the word landet , with the right meaning countryside, is borrowed from Swedish. All these borrowed words are spelled similarly in the target language as they are in the source language. There was only one word borrowed from Swedish that did not have phonetic or phonological similarities with the target word and this was the conjunction men, meaning but in English, mutta in Finnish and aber in German. As stated earlier, the analysis of the word
Universitet caused
controversy. It
would be relatively easy to say, it is a straight borrowing from Swedish, with a capitalised onset. On the other hand, the amount of students using it, could be a sign of something else leading the choice of words. It could well be, that the Swedish spelling and the pronunciation of the German counterpart
Universität have
led the students to
believe the ä in the German word should indeed be e, which is the phonetic equivalent in Finnish. The possible phonetic influence on this word is discussed later on.
43
Only one word was borrowed from the L1. This was the Finnish word Espanja meaning
Spain
in English and
Spanien
in German and Swedish. Unlike most Finnish
words, this word shows some similarity with the target word and could have therefore been activated in the translation process. It can be argued that Munchen, used by three students, is a borrowing from Finnish since, because of the absence of the letter
ü
in the
Finnish alphabet, both Munchen and the correct form München are commonly used in Finnish for Munich.
5.2.1.2 Relexification Relexification
Words, which have been phonologically modified to make them more target language like are called relexifications. The words, which I considered to be relexifications in the translating production of the Finnish-speaking students were
Hause, Mathematicks,
Ingengör, Insinör, Insinöör, Familje, Lährerin, scheren, gesoltet and Legenhet . Hause, Mathematicks
and
Familje
Mathematik and die Familie
are all very close to the target words
das Haus, die
respectively, with only one letter difference to the required
word. Hause is a relexification generated from the English word house. The English word mathematics
has similarly been changed into the more German like word Mathematicks.
The student who used this form may have thought the common German ending –ik blended into the English word gives the required form but, however, failed to replace the English ending with the German one and instead used both of them. The word
Familje
is
a borrowing from Swedish familj, which has been relexified using the ending –e. The correct German word would have been Familie. As stated in the previous section, the word Ingenieur proved to be a tricky one. The form Ingengör is most likely a relexification from the Swedish word
ingenjör .
The
words Insinör and Insinöör have been influenced by the Finnish word insinööri, which has been changed more target like, not only phonetically but also with evident phonological influence from the pronunciation of the German word Ingenieur . The word Lährerin
has been influenced by the Swedish word
lärare,
meaning
teacher .
The first
vowel of the correct German form Lehrerin has been replaced with the corresponding 44
Swedish one. A similar change from the Swedish word Legenhet was
made, however, this change did not produce the correct target word
Wohnung. Legenhet does
German word
lägenhet meaning apartment to die
not belong to the German lexicon but is similar to another
Gelegenheit ,
which, however, does not share the meaning with
lägenhet .
Gelegenheit could be translated to mean an opportunity or an occasion.
The verb relexification
scheren
intended to mean
teilen
or in English
to share
could have been influenced by English. The English word, which has the same meaning as the target word, has been modified with a vowel change and some typical German features, namely the
sch
consonant cluster and the – en verb ending.
Gesoltet could
categorized under relexifications and hybrids. The consonant change from verb
sold would
d to t in
be the
support the theory behind relexifications. The construction also shows
significant signs of hybrid building. These features will be discussed below.
5.2.1.3 Hybrids
Hybrids are forms consisting of morphemes from different languages. Examples of hybrids in the Finnish-speaking students’ production were nexten
and
gesoltet . Sommarferien,
with the meaning sommar and
a replacement for the German word
summer holidays,
the German word
Sommerferien. Swimmen
Sommarferien, Swimmen, sommerferien
is a compound consisting of the Swedish word
Ferien.
The compound is very close to the target form
derives from the English word
swimming
but the English –ing
ending has been replaced by a German ending –en. The student failed to replace the s in the beginning of the word with the German
sch.
Similarly to the previous example, the
ending –en has been added to the English word next to form nexten. The ending is correct, but the word stem should have been nächst and therefore formed
nächsten,
form of the German word for
was formed using the
English past form
sold with
next .
The verb
verkaufen, to sell,
the German verb-prefix
ge-
an inflected
and an ending –et . The –et
ending may have been influenced by the common Swedish verb endings –at and –it as well as the English past ending –ed .
45
5.2.1.4 Translation
Translating native language expressions or using semantic extensions did not seem to be a problem among the Finnish-speaking students. Only three cases of semantically inappropriate translation translation were found. Two of these were uses of the verb gehen instead of reisen or fahren
to mean to go. Finnish uses the verb to go semantically quite similarly as
English does and I considered the use of the general but restricted verb
gehen
to result
from semantic extension of the meaning. Only one student used the verb lieben to express fondness. German uses the verb lieben
similarly as Finnish uses
rakastaa;
only to express
to love
when the affection is
strong. In English it is, however, commonly used in expressions like “I love swimming” or “she loves chocolate”. With this in mind, I came to the conclusion that this Finnishspeaking student must have extended the semantic meaning of the German verb due to being influenced how the English counterpart is used. us ed.
5.2.1.5 Phonetic influence
Some errors in written production occur due to different pronunciation in the two languages. Ringbom (1987) stated that the learner may mispronounce the word, being too greatly influenced by the way it is spelled, or misspell it being influenced by the way it is pronounced. In a classroom situation, the foreign language learner often has very little practice in speaking the target language. Learning the written and spoken forms simultaneously can cause the learner to mix the two forms. A common way of learning target language vocabulary for many learners in Finnish schools seems to be to learn the word as it would be pronounced in Finnish, as if the L2 word were a corresponding string of L1 phonemes. As Finnish has regular one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes, this pronunciation often differs greatly from the target pronunciation and can lead into difficulties mainly in spoken production but also in writing. To my great surprise, 50 percent of the Finnish-speaking students misspelled the German word die
Universität .
The form these students used was 46
die Universitet ,
which
only differs from the correct form by one vowel. As discussed earlier, this choice could be purely borrowing, purely phonetic or as a matter of fact, both combined. If we consider it to be purely phonetic, the reason why so many students made this mistake is clear; German ä is in most cases pronounced like Finnish e. Finnish pronunciation is very regular with very good correspondence between sound and symbol, everything is pronounced the way it is spelled, and while
Universität ,
with the exception of the r and
the ä, is pronounced similarly as it would be if it was a Finnish word, the students may have simply applied their native language pronunciation rules to the spelling of this word. I would, however, suggest that the use of
Universitet
is the result of these two
possibilities acting together. The driving force may well be the Swedish word universitet , which has been certified by the Finnish pronunciation rules.
5.2.2 Grammar Previous research has shown errors arising due to cross-linguistic influence to be more common at the phonological and lexical levels of language than at the grammatical level. Many studies also suggest that non-native language influence is frequent in the area of lexis but is much less significant or nonexistent in grammar and phonology (Ringbom, 1987). With regard to the present study, even though I found some grammatical features, which had possibly been influenced by other languages, the influence was clearly not as widespread and obvious as it was on lexical level.
5.2.2.1 Morphology: Grammatical Gender
Grammatical Grammatical gender can be described to be a grammatical category in inflected languages governing the agreement between nouns, adjectives and pronouns. Indo-European languages typically have three genders, feminine, masculine and neuter, which are usually based on sex or animateness. While German assigns every noun to one of the categories above, English usually only exhibits gender in third person singular personal 47
pronouns he, she and it . German grammatical gender is a lexical feature; gender is based idiosyncratically on individual lexemes. Gender is expressed with articles but often also with endings like –in for feminine occupations and
–chen
for neuter. Therefore, quite
surprisingly, the word Mädchen, meaning little girl, is not a feminine word but neuter one. A common mistake for both groups was to leave the feminine –in ending out in the words
die Studentin
and
die Lehrerin,
respectively. Instead, students used the words
meaning female
student
and
der Student and der Lehrer , the
teacher
masculine
forms of these words. A simple explanation for this could be that this feature is not as common in all the other languages involved in this study. Only German makes a strict distinction between female and male occupational names. English uses gender marking with a number of occupational names but not with all of them. In Finnish it is possible to add an ending to some professional names to mark feminine gender but this feature is not very commonly used. An interesting finding was that while six Finnish-speaking Finnish-speaking students failed to add the feminine ending into the word
Student ,
only three made this mistake
with the word Lehrer . This could be seen as a result of drilling, where the students have been repeatedly told that occupational names for females differ from the male ones but students have failed to apply this rule to similarly functioning words, like Student here.
5.2.2.2 Morphology: Word Formation
The Finnish-speaking group did not have difficulties with morphological features like compounding. Finnish, in many ways, works similarly to German when forming new words through compounding. Derivation then again caused some problems. The –in ending in female occupational names is actually a morphological feature. By the means of derivation, the suffix –in designates a female person and is added to the word meaning the male counterpart. Another feature, which can be counted as derivation is verbs with prefixes. These are verbs with a fixed or a separable prefix, which often changes the meaning of the verb used as a base of the new formation. In the first part of the experiment, the use of two such verbs was tested. These were
erkälten
and anrufen. Nearly all the students failed to
48
identify the form verkälten as an ungrammatical form, only used in some German dialects. The similar appearance of the words might have caused the confusion or then the students simply were not aware of the correct form of the verb. The second verb employed a separable prefix
an-.
Students in general did not recognize the separable prefix in the
sentence and often confused it with the preposition
an.
The right word order also proved
to be a difficult task and many students did not realize that in a main clause, the prefix is placed at the end of the sentence. Problems with prefixes and especially separable prefixes can partly occur due to language transfer and in this case, due to the fact that Finnish does not use separable prefixes.
5.2.2.3 Morphology: Case and Case Endings
Many students made mistakes with case endings. This, however, is not necessarily strongly bound up with language transfer. Finnish uses several endings and although they are very different from the German ones, the students are used to this feature. The first part of the test did, however, indicate that Finnish-speaking students had more difficulty placing correct endings on articles and in many occasions, the students simply omitted the endings. This was not necessarily necessarily due to language transfer but could instead indicate a lack of knowledge in this area of grammar or as Odlin (1989) proposes, it could also result due to simplification. Mistakes with case endings are common in second language learning and simply feature a set of grammatical rules, the use of which improves with practice and fluency. The Finnish-speaking students also accepted the use of dich in connection with the dative preposition
mit more
often than the English-speaking students. The failure to
acknowledge the fact that this preposition requires a dative case could, of course, be due to the non-use of prepositions in Finnish and therefore the students may not have been familiar enough with this feature. The prepositions requiring different cases are, however, taught repeatedly in Finnish schools and therefore the students should have been familiar with the functioning of this preposition and the fact that the dative case of dich is dir .
49
The use of genitive in the expression “University of Munich” caused some problems, which could have been influenced by Finnish. Some students used the expression Münchens Universität , which is grammatically correct but not as widely used as
Universität München
yliopisto
is. Finnish constructs the genitive forms similarly, Münchenin
being the only widely accepted form to use. It is also possible and quite likely
that both Finnish and English have contributed to this case. In English, genitive constructions are most often formed with choice to use Münchens
Universität .
‘s,
which could have directed the students’
Some students also used a mixture of the above
expressions, namely, Universität Münchens, which is incorrect. In this case it is possible that the students have registered the correct order of the words in this exp ression but have still felt the need to add the genitive –s for clarification.
5.2.2.4 Syntax: Articles
Several studies, the most relevant one being Ringbom’s experiments with Finnishspeaking and Swedish-speaking learners of English, have shown that speakers of languages which use articles tend to use them more accurately than do speakers of languages which do not use articles. While familiarity with the use of articles can greatly aid acquiring the usage rules of a new language, it did not seem to be a major factor in this study. It seems that once the learners advance from a beginner level to intermediate level, they have more or less been used to the article system of the target language. It should be stated that this does not mean the learners would not have difficulty choosing the right article, especially when the target language features such a rich article system as German does. Both groups were found to make mistakes with articles, most mistakes being the use of a wrong gender article or using the right article but having trouble finding the right inflected case form. In the present study, I did not consider the problems with the use of articles to have mainly arisen due to cross-linguistic influence. I did consider one area of article use to show signs of cross-linguistic influence. This was the additional feature applying to German occupational names; they lose their article in expressions like
ich bin Lehrerin (I am a teacher)
50
or er ist Ingenieur (he is an
engineer).
The Finnish students, who failed to make use of this rule, may have been
influenced by their English and Swedish knowledge, languages both of which use an article in front of occupational names, although in this case it could also simply be a matter of habit formation with the use of articles.
5.2.2.5 Syntax: Prepositions Prepositions
According to Ringbom (1992) Finnish-speaking students have more problems in using English prepositions than the Swedish-speaking students. As English and German use prepositions in a similar way, the same assumption more than likely also applies to Finnish-speakers and English-speakers learning German. However, I did not find major differences differences between the two test groups and therefore did not consider the problems some students had with prepositions to have been greatly influenced by their native or additional languages.
5.2.2.6 Syntax: Word order
The general word order in German independent clauses is SVO, subject first, predicate second and other elements third. The conjugated verb is placed second in a sentence, second meaning in a second place after the first element, which might be longer than just one word. Before the independent clause there can be items like interjections, exclamations, names or certain adverbial phrases. These items are usually set off by a comma, but do not alter the verb second rule in the independent clause. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. Subordinate or dependent clauses, introduced by a subordinate conjunction or a relative pronoun, place the conjugated verb into postposition, at the end of the subordinate clause, resulting in SOV order. According to Odlin (1989, 1990), little negative transfer occurs where basic word order is concerned if the target language only has one basic word order. However, German has two word order patterns and therefore some cross-linguistic influence could be expected. 51
Both study groups showed relatively good understanding of German word order rules. However, some mistakes were found. In the first part of the test, some students failed to apply the rule that if the main clause comes after the subordinate clause, the verb in the main clause should be in the first position, straight after the comma. This could have been influenced by Finnish but could also be a result of concentrating on the subordinate word order and therefore failing to notice the word order change in the following main clause. The translation part of the test brought up more problems with word order and the four main clauses with wrong word order are analysed below. The first sentence or phrase will always be the incorrect one produced by a student and the second will be an example showing the correct word order.
g o to Spain and live by the sea. Figure 5.1: During the summer holidays she is going to go Red colour indicates conjugated verb, blue colour indicates verb in base form.
The student has failed to apply the th e “verb second” rule for the conjugated verb. This could have been affected by both Finnish and English, both of which in this case place the subject ahead of the conjugated verb. Similarly if a conjunction links two phrases which share the conjugated verb, the verb in base form should stand in the same position in both of them. This student successfully placed the verb in base form in the end of the first part of the sentence but failed to apply this rule after the conjunction.
Figure 5.2: Their house will be sold next year. Red colour indicates conjugated passive auxiliary verb, blue colour indicates past participle. p articiple.
52
The German verbs
werden
or
sein
are used as an auxiliary in conjunction with the past
participle in passive constructions. The auxiliary is conjugated and placed in its correct position, which in this case is the second position. The past participle is placed in the end of the sentence, similarly as the base form in the previous example. This student failed to place the past participle in the end position and instead placed it straight after the conjugated verb. This again could have been influenced by either Finnish or English, both of which approve the use of this order.
Figure 5.3: Their house will be sold next year. Red colour indicates conjugated passive auxiliary verb, blue colour indicates past participle. p articiple. This student did not know how to form the passive construction and simply used the base form to express it. This could have been influenced by Finnish, as in Finnish the passive voice is very similar to the base form of the verb and would be usually positioned after the object as this student did.
Figure 5.4: Their house will be sold next year. Red colour indicates conjugated passive auxiliary verb, blue colour indicates past participle. p articiple. This student has used a subordinate clause word order in main clause. This word order does not show signs of cross-linguistic influence, as neither Finnish4 nor English use such order in passive voice. 4
In Finnish it is possible to use such word order if the speaker wants to emphasize the fact that “it is next year when their house will be sold”; ensi vuonna heidän talonsa myydään . However, such emphasis was not expected to be expressed in this sentence.
53
The following figures show relative clauses and subordinate clauses, which caused difficulty for the Finnish-speaking students.
Figure 5.5: , in which she lives with her friends. Red colour indicates conjugated verb. This phrase again could have been influenced by either Finnish or English as both languages place conjugated verb after the subject subj ect in relative clauses.
Figure 5.6: , because she loves swimming. Red colour indicates conjugated verb. The vocabulary in this sentence is highly influenced by Swedish and this would suggest that the word order could have also been affected by the similar Swedish construction därför att hon simmar gärna.
The word order could have also been influenced by the
Finnish word order, as in Finnish it is possible to use a similar construction; mielellään, where mielellään expresses Swedish gärna and German gern.
Figure 5.7: , because she loves swimming. Red colour indicates conjugated verb.
54
koska hän ui
This clause then again shows clear cross-linguistic influence from Finnish or English, both of which place the verb after the subject and the object after the verb in this kind of sentences.
friends . Figure 5.8: , which she shares with her friends. Red colour indicates conjugated verb.
This sentence does not show clear cross-linguistic influence. Finnish, Swedish or English do not place the conjugated verb in front of the subject in such cases. One possibility is that the student has incorrectly used the “verb second” rule in this construction.
5.2.3 Avoidance The Finnish-speaking students did not try to avoid using relative clauses or other such constructions. The only form of avoidance I found was lexical avoidance, or more so incompleteness. Many students left gaps, some only missing words but some actually also missing clauses. This may be due to these items missing in their lexicon or being unavailable but it could also be seen as ignorance. These constructions may have been viewed as too difficult and therefore left incomplete. Most students did start the clause but left it incomplete after being unable to complete it, which would suggest lack of motivation in trying to complete the task properly.
55
L1 Finnish students: Words and phrases featuring cross-linguistic influence Mistake Occurred/Expected Source language Occurrences (no of students)
Fem –in missing Words with features from other languages
Translations Unwanted article in front of professional name Phonetic influence
Student/Studentin Lehrer/Lehrerin Hause/Haus Mathematics/Mathematik Mathematicks/Mathematik Sommarferien/Sommerferien Ocean/Meer Swimmen/Schwimmen Ingengör/Ingenieur Insinör/Ingenieur Insinöör/Ingenieur Ingenjör/Ingenieur Rum/Raum Espanja/Spanien near/in der Nähe simmar/schwimmt gärna/gern der See/die See, das Meer will/wird Familj/Familie Familje/Familie Lährerin/Lehrerin nexten/nächstes scheren/teilen Landesblaan/Bauernhaus Munchen/München University/Universität landet/Land men/aber gesoltet/verkauft Legenhet/Wohnung Universitet/ Universität gehen/fahren,reisen (lieben/mögen, gern haben ein Ingenieur/Ingenieur Ingenieur/Ingenieur eine Lehrerin/Lehrerin Lehrerin/Lehrerin
Universitet/Universität
Fin. Engl. Fin. Engl. Engl. House Engl. mathematics Engl. mathematics Swe. sommar Engl. ocean Engl. swimming Swe. ingenjör Swe. ingenjör Swe. ingenjör Swe. ingenjör Swe. rum Fin. Espanja Engl. near Swe. simma Swe. gärna Engl. See Engl. will Swe. familj Swe. familj Swe. lärare Engl. next Engl. share Ger. runway Fin? Engl. university Swe. landet Swe. men Engl. sold Swe. lägenhet Swe. universitet Fin. mennä Engl. go Engl. love Engl. uses articles
Ger. ä pronounced like Fin. e 56
6 3 7 1 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 1 3 1 1 1 1 3 1 3 1 1 1 1 1 3 1 1 1 1 1 8* 2 1) 3 3
8*
Unwanted use of genitive Verb ending Word order:
Universität Münchens (Münchens Universität
Fin. Fin.
2 3)
Besuchtet/besucht Besuchtet/besucht welcher sie wohnt mit seinem Freund/ in dem sie mit ihren Freundinnen wohnt
Swe. at/it endings Fin. SVO Engl. SVO (Ger. SOV)
1 1
In Sommerurlaub sie denkt nach Fin. SVO Espanja gehen und wohn near der Engl. SVO See, …/ (Ger. VSO) Im Sommerurlaub wird sie nach Spanien fahren und am Meer wohnen, … Fin. SVO , weil sie simmar gärna/ Engl. SVO , weil sie gern schwimmt (Ger. Verb end)
1
1
ihr Haus wird verkauft an nächstes Fin./Engl. All verb Jahre/ forms together 1 ihr Haus wird nächstes Jahr verkauft (Ger. Conjugated verb second) ihre hause kaufen Jahren/ ihr Haus wird nächstes Jahr verkauft See above 1 ihren Hause im nächsten Jahre See above gekauft wird/ ihr Haus wird nächstes Jahr verkauft Fin. Passive form kaufen nächstes Jahr/ expressed with one wird nächstes Jahr verkauft verb
1 2
München Universität/ Universität München
Fin. Place name before the institution name
4
, weil sie lieben Schwimmen/ , weil sie Schwimmen liebt
Fin. Engl. SVO (Ger. SOV)
1
, die teilt sie mit seiner Freunde/ , die sie mit ihren Freundinnen teilt
slight Fin./ Engl. SVO influence (Ger. SOV)
1
Table 5.5: Errors, which could have occurred due to cross-linguistic influence in the translation part. (* indicates a mistake which could be categorized under two categories) 57
5.3 Cross-linguistic Influence: English-speaking Students The English-speaking students did not seem to transfer as many lexical items as the Finnish-speaking students did. This may simply be explained by the fact that the general level of the English-speaking students’ language proficiency was higher than that of the Finnish-speaking ones. The English-speaking students were third-level students and had been studying German approximately 2.5 years longer than the Finnish-speaking senior secondary school students. The larger number of errors arising due to cross-linguistic influence in the Finnish students’ production is also supported by Taylor’s (1975) claim that learners at an elementary level produced more transfer errors and less intralingual errors than learners at an intermediate or advanced level.
5.3.1 Lexicon 5.3.1.1 Borrowing
Some say that borrowing is more likely to occur from a non-native language into the target language than from the native language itself but Ringbom (1987) suggests borrowing takes place from a related language, regardless of whether or no t this language is the mother tongue. While the Finnish-speaking students showed barely any indication of lexical native language transfer, the English-speaking students transferred only from their native English. This could also be seen as code-mixing, a form of communication transfer where first language and target language are used in the same sentence in order to overcome communication problems. A small number of students borrowed words directly from their native English. These borrowed words were Engineer,
Munich, will, University.
Like the Finnish-
speaking students, the English-speaking group made the same capitalization change with nouns to make them more German like. Engineer and University are relatively close to 58
their German counterparts
der Ingenieur and die Universität .
correct third person singular form of the German verb want and
The verb form
will
is a
wollen, which, however, means to
does not imply to future actions like the verb
werden
and its third person
singular form wird do. One student used the English verb form is instead of the German counter part ist . The two forms are very similar in form and identical in meaning which could have caused the language switch to take place. However, it is also possible that in this case it purely is a spelling mistake due to lack of attention in search for the correct form.
5.3.1.2 Relexification Relexification
As seen in the previous study group of Finnish-speaking students, the word Ingenieur caused greater difficulty. The relexifications Ingineer,
Ingineur and Engineur were
all
found to have influence from this group’s native language English. One student only changed the initial English
e
to i and considered this to be enough to form the German
counterpart from the English word
engineer .
The two other attempts seem somewhat
closer to the target word. Both of them missed the correct spelling of the target word. The vowel combination ieu is not known to English and may have therefore caused confusion or complete lack of acknowledgement. An attempt was also made to change Munich into its German form only by adding an umlaut to u to form Münich. The correct form would have been München. The attempted word Farmhause also counts as a relexification from English, which most likely was influenced by the English farmhouse. What was expected exp ected was Bauernhaus or Farm.
5.3.1.3 Hybrids
Only one clear hybrid formation was found in the production of the English-speaking students. This was the form
nextes,
which was intended to mean
next .
The ending –es,
which is indeed an ending used for the neutral case in strong adjective inflexion, was 59
added to the English word next, but the correct German word would have been nächstes in its inflected form. It can be argued that the words
Sommer Urlaub
and Sommer Ferien
count as hybrids as well. In these cases, the problem is morphological; the words themselves are correct correct but they should have been in compound forms, written together, to form the words
Sommerurlaub
and
Sommerferien
respectively. These students failed to
acknowledge the German style of word formation and used the English style instead.
5.3.1.4 Translation
The English-speaking students used translation much more than the Finnish-speaking group did. The items translated were verbs, which have similar meaning in German but are not considered correct or are found to be too strong in the expression. These verbs were gehen, leben and lieben. In English it is acceptable to use the verb go in expressions like I’m
going to Spain
or
she wants to go on a holiday.
In German, however, the
equivalent verb gehen is only used when the “going” is done on foot. When the distance is greater and the destination is farther apart, and it is clear that the moving will not be done on foot, the equivalent of travel is used. Therefore, in such cases the verbs fahren or reisen are
acceptable.
Similar semantic difference difference in use can be found with the verb leben, to live. Again in English, the same verb can be used to mean someone lives in a certain place as well as to say someone is alive. German, however, has a more restricted use for general is only used to express the fact that someone is alive. The verb
leben,
which in
wohnen
has to be
used in contexts expressing residence. Many students used the verb lieben to express “she loves swimming”. While this is not an error as such, in some contexts it would be considered too strong a verb in German and a verb with the meaning
to like
would be considered more acceptable.
Therefore mögen or gern haben are more appropriate to use in such contexts.
60
5.3.2 Grammar 5.3.2.1 Morphology: Grammatical Gender
The English-speaking students did not make quite as many errors with the ending –in, denoting feminine occupational names, as the Finnish-speaking students. This could simply be explained by the fact that feminine occupational names, such as waitress
stewardess
or
are no strangers to English. However, similarly to the previous study group, the
English-speaking students never missed the ending with the word Lehrerin but two students did not include the ending to the word
Student to
form the feminine version
Studentin.
5.3.2.2 Morphology: Word Formation
English word formation rarely uses compounds, which then again are very common in German. Two English-speaking students had difficulty adjusting to the German way of word formation and instead of Sommerulaub and English-like formations
Sommer Urlaub
and
Sommerferien
Sommer Ferien
they used the more
respectively. The students
are usually made familiar with this feature quite early, especially in classroom situations, and therefore advanced learners rarely have problems with using compounds. Error recognition in the first part of the test caused some difficulty in identifying verbs with prefixes. Similarly to the Finnish group, students had major difficulty identifying the wrong prefix in
verkälten.
Although
verkälten
is colloquially used in
southern Germany, the correct form that should have been used is students also claimed that the sentence
ich rufe dich morgen an
erkälten.
Many
is grammatically
incorrect. While the use of anrufen proved to be slightly more under control among the English-speaking students, it was still a frequent error to confuse the prefix with the preposition Morgen
an.
One possible reason for this is the more or less fixed expression
am
being mixed up with the temporal word morgen. This may have been elaborated
61
by the possibility of using the verb rufen with a nearly identical meaning to anrufen. With this in mind, it is not obvious that cross-linguistic influence would have played a significant role in this case. However, as English does not use separable verb prefixes the possibility of cross-linguistic influence cannot be strictly ruled out.
5.3.2.3 Morphology: Case and Case Endings
English case is mainly expressed by word order and therefore case endings are not used. English-speaking students made mistakes with case endings but similarly to the Finnish group, these mistakes cannot be seen as occurring purely due to cross-linguistic influence. influence. In this case, omitting endings could be seen as English having negative influence on the learners’ production. While the English-speaking students performed better when it comes to case endings in articles and inflected pronouns, the smaller number of errors in their production could also be related to their slightly higher level of proficiency in German. The English-speaking students also had difficulty with the genitive construction “University of Munich”. Interestingly enough, two students used the expression Universität von München, which is a
straight translation of the English counterpart.
5.3.2.4 Syntax: Articles
As mentioned above, I did not consider problems with articles to have been greatly influenced by the speakers’ previous knowledge of languages. The two groups were found to make approximately the same amount of errors. Although the English speakers are thought to have an advantage learning German articles, I would suggest that this applies only to beginners’ level. The English article system is not as rich as the German system, nor do English articles have inflectional forms in different cases. This would imply that while English-speakers might find it easier to understand the basic use of
62
German articles, they are not greatly aided by their native language when acquiring the more complex ways to use and inflect German articles. The use, or rather the non-use, of articles in front of professional names then again proved to cause more difficulties among the English-speaking students. While the number of students incorrectly placing an article in front of the professional names Ingenieur and Lehrerin
in the Finnish-speaking group was three, it was significantly
higher rising up to 10 and 11 respectively in the English-speaking group. These errors were more than likely due to English using articles in similar contexts.
5.3.2.5 Syntax: Prepositions Prepositions
As stated earlier, the two groups performed relatively equally in the use of prepositions. English uses prepositions similarly to German and I was not expecting the Englishspeaking students to have major difficulty with them.
5.3.2.6 Syntax: Word Order
English word order is generally strictly SVO, which is also the common order in German main clauses. However, the German subordinate clause word order SOV, caused some difficulty for the English-speaking students, many of whom incorrectly used the SVO order instead of placing the conjugated verb at the end of the clause. These errors were likely to have been influenced by the English use of SVO order also in subordinate clauses. The first part of the test showed that similarly to the Finnish-speaking students, some students had difficulty correcting the word order of a main clause if it follows a subordinate clause. This could have been influenced by English, a language which does not use a VSO order in the following main clause. As suggested previously, crosslinguistic influence was more than likely not the main cause for these errors to occur.
63
The following figures show the incorrect sentences or phrases in the translation part of the test and propose a corrected version of the same clause. The main clauses (figure 5.9 to figure 5.12) will be analysed before the subordinate and relative clauses. The colours indicate the verbs and the forms they should be presented p resented in.
Figure 5.9: During the summer holidays she is going to go g o to Spain and live by the sea. Red colour indicates conjugated verb, blue colour indicates verb in base form. This student has only used the base forms of the verbs. It seems as the student has dealt with the sentence as if it was two separate sentences. If the second part of the clause, after the conjunction und , would stand on its own as a main clause, and the verb werden was in its conjugated form, the clause itself would be correct. The preposition während , however, changes the word order so, that the conjugated verb has to be placed before the subject, which in this case is sie. The future auxiliary werden should be placed before the subject in its conjugated form
wird and
it should not be repeated in the coordinated clause. As
interesting as the word order in this sentence is, I do not consider it to have been greatly influenced by English.
Figure 5.10: Their house will be sold next year. Red colour indicates conjugated verb, blue colour indicates verb in base form. This student has decided to start the sentence with a temporal construction and has correctly placed placed the past participle at the end of the sentence. However, the “verb second”
64
rule been ignored and the passive auxiliary has been added to the string of verbs at the end of the sentence. In addition, strangely enough, the form will, a conjugated form of the verb wollen, has been added to the end. The student could have confused the English verb will,
which is used in future expressions, with the false cognate German form, which,
however, means to want . As seen in previous examples, German future uses the auxiliary werden. This sentence shows signs of transfer from English; next year their house will be sold .
Also, the use of three verbs in the English counterpart could have caused the
unnecessary third German verb to have been inserted in the end.
Figure 5.11: Their house will be sold next year. Red colour indicates conjugated verb, blue colour indicates verb in base form. In this example, the passive auxiliary has been inserted in the end of the sentence, although it should stand in the second position. The student has also failed to conjugate the verb correctly and has instead left it in the base form. The word order does not indicate language transfer from from English and could instead just show lacking skills to form passive constructions.
Figure 5.12: She has been living in Munich for four years. Red colour indicates conjugated verb, blue colour indicates verb in base form. In figure 5.12, a future expression has been used. Expressions with
seit (Engl. since)
are
usually formed with active constructions in German and in this example a simple use of present tense was required as the preposition already shows the action has been going on
65
for a while. The conjugated verb is not in the “verb second” position and the choice to place the prepositional phrase after the subject seems odd. In any case, it does not derive from English word order.
friends . Figure 5.13: , which she shares with her friends. Red colour indicates conjugated verb.
This relative clause shows clear signs of cross-linguistic influence from English. The verb has been placed after the subject although in German relative clauses it should be at the end of the clause.
Figure 5.14: , where she lives with her friends. Red colour indicates conjugated verb. Similarly as in figure 5.13, the word order in this clause has been influenced by the English word order.
Figure 5.15: , because she loves swimming. Red colour indicates conjugated verb. This subordinate clause shows signs of English influence. The conjugated verb should have been placed at the end of the sentence but instead, it stands after the subject as it would in the English counterpart. 66
Figure 5.16: , because she loves swimimng. Red colour indicates conjugated verb. Similarly as above, the word order has more than likely been influenced by English. Instead of placing the conjugated verb at the end of the subordinate clause, it has been placed after the subject.
5.3.3 Avoidance Avoidance was not a major cause of concern for the English-speaking students. Only a few students tried splitting long sentences apart to avoid using subordinate constructions or complicated expressions. Only a few students left gaps where they did not know the correct word or clause. The first clear case of avoidance was the use of two sentences instead of one when expressing of saying
Sabine is a 23 years old student from Germany.
Sabine ist eine 23-jährige Studentin aus Deutschland one
use the expressions
Instead
student decided to
Sabine ist ein 23 jahre alt . Sie ist eine Studentin auf Deutschland ,
where the underlined parts are grammatically incorrect. This could have been caused by the lexical lack of the German word jährige, or by just the will to form short simple sentences. The second case was an avoidance of a subordinate construction. Instead of saying während der Sommerferien wird sie nach Spanien fahren und am Meer wohnen, weil sie Schwimmen liebt ,
the student split the sentence in two using the expressions
während die Sommerferien, wird sie nach Spanien ge fahren und in der Nähe des Sees gewohnt . Sie liebt schwimmen.
67
L1 English students: Words and phrases featuring cross-linguistic influence Mistake Occurred/Expected Source language Occurrences (no of students)
Fem –in missing
Student/Studentin
Engl.
2
Words with features from other languages
Engineer/Ingenieur Ingineer/Ingenieur Ingineur/Ingenieur Engineur/Ingenieur Munich/München Münich/München der See/sie See, das Meer Apartment/Wohnung das Apartment Apartment/Wohnung will/wird University/Universität Sommer Urlaub Sommer Ferien nextes/nächstes Farmhause/Bauernhaus is/ist gehen/fahren leben/wohnen (lieben/ mögen, gern haben ein Ingenieur/Ingenieur Ingenieur/Ingenieur eine Lehrerin/Lehrerin Lehrerin/Lehrerin
Engl. engineer Engl. engineer Engl. engineer Engl. engineer Engl. Munich Engl. Munich Engl. See Engl. apartment Engl. apartment Engl. will Engl. university Engl. Engl. Engl. next Engl. farmhouse Engl. is Engl. go Engl. live Engl. love Engl. uses articles Engl. uses articles
2 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 6 5 11) 10 11
Universität von München/ Universität München
Engl. university of 2 Munich
Translations Unwanted article in front of professional name Unwanted use of genitive
68
Word order
, die sie teilt mit ihren Freunden/ , die sie mit ihren Freunden teilt
Engl. SVO (Ger. SOV)
1
, da sie wohnt mit .../ , wo sie mit ihren Freunden wohnt
Engl. SVO (Ger. SOV)
1
, weil sie liebt die See/ , weil sie die See liebt
Engl. SVO (Ger. SOV)
1
denn sie liebt Schwimmen/ , weil sie Schwimmen liebt
Engl. SVO (Ger. SOV)
1
während die Sommer Urlaub sie nach Spanien fahren werden und sie SOV werden bei dem Meer leben/ Engl. SVO während der Sommerferien wird sie (Ger. VSO) nach Spanien fahren und am Meer wohnen nachst Jahr seinen Haus werden Engl. All verbs verkaufen will/ together in a ihr Haus wird nächstes Jahr verkauft passive expression (Ger. Conjugated verb second) seinen Haus nachsten Jahr verkauft werden/ See above ihr Haus wird nächstes Jahr verkauft Sie seit 4 Jahren wird in München wohnen/ (Ger. SVO) Sie wohnt in München seit vier Jahren
1
1
1
1
Table 5.6: Errors, which could have occurred due to cross-linguistic influence in the translation part.
69
5.4. Comparison of the Two Test Groups As discussed above, with regard to cross-linguistic influence on the lexicon, the Finnishspeaking students rarely made use of their native language Finnish. More than likely due to psychotypological facts, they seemed to perceive Swedish and English as more appropriate sources of transfer. The English-speaking students then again only used their native language English as the source of transfer. This was a result I was also expecting, largely due to their additional second language, Irish, being typologically rather distant from German. The Finnish-speaking students also showed more cross-linguistic influence on the lexicon than the English-speaking students. This could partly be explained by typological features of Finnish and English and the fact that Finnish is more distant from German than English. However, it should not be ignored that the English-speaking students’ level of proficiency was higher than that of the Finnish-speaking students.
Finnish-speaking Students Source Finnish Language Type of Transfer 1 + 3* Borrowing 3 Relexification Hybrid 2** Translation 8*** Phonetic influence
Swedish
English
Total
11 + 8*** 4 2
5 9 4 1 + 2**
17 (+ 11) 16 6 1 (+ 2) (+ 8)
English-speaking Students English/Total
6 5 3 22
Table 5.7: Types and amount of lexical transfer in the present study. * Munchen could be a borrowing bo rrowing from “colloquial” Finnish. ** gehen could be influenced by both English and Finnish. *** Universitet could show borrowing from Swedish, phonetic influence from Finnish or both.
70
Expressing grammatical gender proved to be more difficult for the Finnishspeaking students than the English-speaking students. The reason for this could simply be the fact that Finnish uses grammatical gender very rarely. English does not use it as widely as German does, but it is still a common feature of the language. Another morphological feature, which caused minor difficulty for the English students was word formation through compounding. This is a frequently used in Finnish and the Finnishspeaking students did not have any an y difficulty using the same feature in German. What I found to be extremely interesting was that despite the higher level of proficiency, the English-speaking students seemed to have more difficulties with word order. And while the relative and subordinate subo rdinate clauses showed clear transfer from English, the word order mistakes in main clauses did not seem to have evolved due to crosslinguistic influence. The Finnish-speaking students then again did show signs of language transfer in their main clause production. As discussed in chapter 2, avoidance is difficult to measure. The Finnish-speaking students did leave more gaps, which was probably due to lack of lexical knowledge. This cannot be purely classified as avoidance, as the students clearly did not know the words. Occasionally some students did not complete sentences, which could be seen as unwillingness to try difficult constructions. English speaking students did not leave as many gaps in their production but on two occasions students tried to use simpler constructions.
5.5 Comparison of the Results with Previous Study As stated in Cenoz, Hufeisen and Jessner (2002), L3 speakers use a second language, which is typologically closer to the L3 as the source language of transfer or default supplier rather than the typologically distant first language. This is in close connection to the idea that the less two languages have in common, the more they are represented separately. This clearly seemed to be the case in lexical transfer occurring in the Finnishspeaking students’ production. They did not use Finnish, a typologically distant language 71
from German, as their source of transfer but instead relied more on Swedish and English. While language transfer and the use of source languages in this case might have mainly occurred unconsciously, it is clear that the Finnish students perceived Swedish and English to be more closely related to German than Finnish is. The possible conscious use of Swedish and English vocabulary can be explained by the idea of “talking foreign”, which learners sometimes use as a communication strategy if they are lacking correct vocabulary. Meisel (1983) describes this as a factor that can predict cross-linguistic influence and calls this phenomenon “foreign language effect” of L2 status, where learners tend to use the L2 or languages other than L1 as the source language. Englishspeaking students then again only used their native language as the source of transfer. This could be explained by the closer relation English has with German but also with the fact that the English students had only studied Irish before, which is a member of the Celtic language family and, as expected, did not make use of it due to its distance from German. Ringbom (1992) concluded his experiments with Finnish-speaking and Swedishspeaking learners of English to show that the Finnish-speakers had more problems in using prepositions than the Swedish-speakers. According to him, the main problem was not the use of wrong prepositions but the actual lack of using them. Swedish, English and German are much more closely related than Finnish is to any of these three and therefore Ringbom’s statement could very well hold for the present experiment as well. While I found the Finnish-speaking learners to make more mistakes with prepositions than the English-speaking learners, the marginal difference was not very high. The Finnishspeaking learners only made 0.2 more prepositional errors per student compared to the English-speaking learners. From this point of view I did not obtain similar findings to Ringbom’s study as the Finnish-speakers did not seem to omit prepositions but simply occasionally to use the wrong ones. Several studies, the most relevant ones being Ringbom’s experiments with Finnish-speaking and Swedish-speaking learners of English, have shown that speakers of languages, which use articles, tend to use them more accurately than do speakers of languages, which do not use articles. With regard to the present study, both groups had equally difficulties with articles. The most common difficulties were the choice of a
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wrong article or the use of a wrong inflected form of an article. It was sometimes difficult to distinguish which of the above was the actual error as some inflected forms take on identical forms with other articles. As an example of this would be the dative form of the feminine article die, which is identical to the masculine article der . Ringbom (2001) implies in his distinction between transfer of form and transfer of meaning. He claims that while the L2 provides more material for transfer of form, instances of transfer of meaning as well as semantically-based lexical transfer, which require considerable fluency and automatization in the source language, show more evidence of L1 influence on L3, even when L1 and L3 are typologically distant. With regard to the present study, his idea of L2 being the source of transfer of form clearly held among the Finnish-speaking students. They nearly always used Swedish or English as a source language and very rarely transferred Finnish forms into their German production. Odlin (1989) refers to the “universalist position” that very little negative transfer occurs where basic word order is concerned. Zoble (1986) similarly argues that learners do not make use of their L1 knowledge where basic word order is concerned but states that if the target language has more than one basic word order, transfer from L1 is possible. German uses SVO patterns among others in main clauses and SOV in subordinate clauses and if Zoble’s idea of word order transfer was to be trusted, I could have expected some cross-linguistic influence on word order to occur in th e present study. As stated earlier, surprisingly enough, the English-speaking students’ production was more prone to word order errors than the Finnish-speaking students’ production. While the English-speaking students did not clearly transfer from English in their main clause production, the cross-linguistic influence on subordinate clauses was clear. Some evidence of cross-linguistic influence influence from the native language in main clause word order could be found in the production of the Finnish-speaking students. While all three languages use SVO word order in the most basic word orders, the German “verb second” rule seemed to cause difficulty and therefore where Finnish normally uses SVO also if the clause begins with a temporal construction, the change to VSO in German was not mastered by all students. However, it was not always clear if the cross-linguistic
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influence on word order originated from Finnish, Swedish, English or all of them at the same time.
5.6 Concluding Summary Before I embarked on my research I had certain speculations of what results I might find. My main expectation that the Finnish-speaking students are more likely to draw on their L2 knowledge of Swedish or English was proved a correct one. The general belief that L1 speakers of typologically close languages find it easier to learn related languages, at least in the early stages of acquisition, was also partly confirmed. While the English-speaking students were slightly more proficient in German, the smaller amount of errors in their production could indicate that English is aiding their acquisition of German. The main results in the present study, besides some slight differences mentioned above, were comparable to previous research in the field of cross-linguistic influence. Completing this project and especially having set up the tests and analysed the results have given me great insight into how cross-linguistic influence occurs and what the main factors facilitating facilitating or preventing it are.
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Chapter 6 Conclusion 6.1 Achievements This dissertation furthered my interest in second language acquisition and especially in the field of cross-linguistic influence. I was especially delighted to have had the opportunity to carry out an experiment in this area. The process of analysing the results of the present study was a very interesting one and although the results were in general as predicted, some unexpected and interesting findings were also made.
6.2 Summary of Cross-linguistic Influence: General Introduction Evidently, cross-linguistic influence is an important factor in the field of second language acquisition and cannot be regarded as a minor phenomenon with slight side-effects on the acquisition process. It is important not only to concentrate on the learners native language as any additional languages the learner might have previously acquired are likely to play a role in the acquisition process as well. The notion of cross-linguistic influence was first proposed during the post-war years and has ever since been of interest to second language researchers. researchers. It is clear that research in this area is on-going and the influence of the native language as well as any possible additional languages continues to attract attention in the field of second language acquisition.
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6.3. Summary of the Present Study Results The results of the present study were not largely surprising. As expected, the Finnishspeaking learners were more likely to make use of their Swedish and English knowledge rather than to transfer from their native Finnish. While in the production of the Finnishspeaking students cross-linguistic influence on the lexicon nearly without exception came from Swedish or English, some Finnish influence could be seen on grammar. To no surprise, the production of the English-speaking students showed signs of transfer from English on both the lexicon and grammar. Irish did not seem to have had much influence on their German acquisition. The results largely confirmed the belief that psychotypology plays a very important role in cross-linguistic influence. influence. While the results of the present study have given an insight into how different languages affect the acquisition process of an additional language, the discussion can only be considered as suggestive and the production of individual learners cannot necessarily necessarily be regarded as representing an entire population. popu lation.
6.4 Concluding Remarks Ringbom’s (1987) idea to compare foreign language learning with learning of ball games has been proved to be a somewhat accurate one. However, it cannot be considered to be the sole reason for the phenomenon of cross-linguistic influence. There are numerous factors affecting the type and amount of language transfer and although what seem to be the most important factors have been discovered and discussed in great detail, work in the field of cross-linguistic influence is on-going and the research opportunities are obviously vast. This paper has discussed some of the main findings in this field and compared these with the findings in the present study. While the aim of this paper was to confirm or give doubt to some of the previous research results, it is just a drop in the ocean in relation to the on-going work in this field.
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Appendix Question 1 Test sentences Students were asked to indicate incorrect sentences and explain why they thought the sentence was ungrammatica un grammatical.l. 1. Ich habe kein Geld mehr, weil ich so viele Weihnachtsgeschenke gekauft habe. 2. Vielen Dank för deinen Brief. 3. Mir geht es schlecht, ich habe mich gestern verkältet. 4. Ich habe ein Bruder, er ist 20 Jahre alt. 5. Der Brief war von mir geschrieben worden. 6. Der alte Mann da spricht am Telefon. 7. Rufst du mich an morgen? 8. Ich habe gestern mit dem Auto nach Frankfurt gefahren. 9. Weil er sehr müde ist, er geht ins Bett. 10. Ich kann auf keinen Fall mit dich kommen.
Answers Finnish-speaking students:
Sentence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect incorrect incorrect correct incorrect correct correct incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence kein: inflection missing för : should be für er : should be wie
an: morgen is not feminine er geht : wrong word order dich: should be in dative case
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Sentence
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect correct incorrect correct correct incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence
1 2 3 4 5
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect incorrect correct incorrect
6 7 8 9 10
correct correct correct correct incorrect
Sentence
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect correct correct incorrect correct correct incorrect incorrect correct
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Sentence
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
för : Swedish word ein: should be in
accusative case (einen)
an morgen: should be am Morgen habe: wrong auxiliary er geht : wrong word order dich: wrong pronoun (should be dir )
för : Swedish word, should be für verkältet : shold be without umlaut worden: word should be left out or put in
position
another
dich: should be in dative case (dir )
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence för : should be für
worden: should be warden
habe: should be bin er geht : should be geht er
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Sentence 1 2 3 4
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect incorrect incorrect
5 6 7 8 9 10
incorrect incorrect correct correct correct correct
Sentence 1 2 3
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect incorrect
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
correct correct correct correct correct incorrect incorrect
Sentence
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect correct correct correct correct incorrect correct correct correct
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence för : Swedish word, should be für
wrong word order Bruder : wrong word; ist : should be placed at the end of the sentence war, worden: incorrectly positioned da: should be after spricht
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence för : should be für Mir geht es schlecht : should be Es geht mir schlecht
er geht : should be geht er auf keinen Fall: should be nicht ; dich: should be dir
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence för : misspelled
preposition missing in front of morgen
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Sentence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Sentence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Sentence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect correct correct correct correct incorrect correct incorrect correct
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect correct correct incorrect correct correct correct incorrect correct
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect correct correct incorrect correct correct correct incorrect incorrect
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence
för : Swedish word, should be für
morgen: should be Morgen er geht : wrong word order
för : shold be für
worden: wrong
er geht : should be geht er
för : should be für
worden: wrong
er geht : wrong word order, o rder, predicate should be first dich: should be in dative case; dir
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Sentence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Sentence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Sentence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect correct incorrect correct incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect correct incorrect correct incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect correct incorrect correct incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence för : should be für
should be Ich habe ein Bruder . Er ist 20 Jahre alt . da spricht : should be spricht da an morgen: should be am Morgen an habe: should be bin er geht : should be er geht dich: should be dir
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence för : should be für
should be Ich habe ein Bruder . Er ist 20 Jahre alt . da spricht : should be spricht da should be Rufst du mich am morgen an? habe: should be bin er geht : should be geht er dich: should be dir
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence för : should be für
should be Ich habe ein Bruder . Er ist 20 Jahre alt . da spricht : should be spricht da an morgen: should be am Morgen habe: should be bin er geht : should be geht er dich: should be dir
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Sentence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Sentence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Sentence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect incorrect correct correct correct correct incorrect correct correct
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct correct correct correct correct correct correct correct incorrect incorrect
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect incorrect incorrect correct incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect correct incorrect incorrect
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence
för deinen: should be für deine es: could be left out
gestern: could be placed after Auto
er geht : wrong word order dich: wrong
gekauft habe: wrong word order för : Swedish word ein: wrong inflection mir : wrong form spricht : wrong inflection an: should be am er geht : wrong word order auf keinen Fall: wrong position
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Sentence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Sentence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect correct correct correct correct incorrect correct correct incorrect
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect incorrect correct incorrect correct incorrect correct correct correct incorrect incorrect
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence
för : wrong preposition
an: should be am
mit : wrong preposition
gekauft habe: wrong ich: wrong worden: wrong
er geht : wrong auf keinen Fall: wrong
English-speaking students:
Sentence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect correct incorrect correct incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence för : should be für ein: accusative, should be einen da spricht : should be spricht da an: should be at the end of the sentence habe: should be bin er geht : should be geht er (verb comma verb) dich: should be dir (dative)
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Sentence 1 2 3
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect incorrect
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
incorrect correct incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect
Sentence 1 2 3 4
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect incorrect incorrect
5 6 7 8 9 10
correct correct incorrect correct incorrect incorrect
Sentence
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect correct incorrect correct correct incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence för : should be für should be Mir geht es schlecht . Ich habe mich Gestern verkältet . ein: accusative, should be einen da spricht : should be spricht da an: should be am gestern: should be Gestern er geht : should be geht er mit dich kommen: should be dich mitkommen
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence för : should be für ich habe: should be habe ich should be Ich habe einen Bruder . Er ist 20 Jahre alt .
an: should be am er geht : should be geht er dich: should be dir
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence för : should be für ein: should be einen
Should be Rufst du mich morgen an? habe: should be bin er geht : should be geht er dich: should be dir
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Sentence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Sentence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Sentence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect correct correct correct correct incorrect correct incorrect incorrect
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect correct incorrect correct correct correct correct incorrect incorrect
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect correct incorrect correct correct correct incorrect incorrect incorrect
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence
för : wrong
an: wrong er geht : wrong dich: wrong
för : should be für ein: should be einen
er geht : should be geht er dich: dative, should be dir
för : should be für ein: accusative, should be einen
habe: should be bin er geht : wrong word order, should be geht er dich: dative, should be dir
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Sentence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Sentence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Sentence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect correct correct correct incorrect incorrect correct correct incorrect
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect correct incorrect incorrect correct incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect correct correct incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence
för : misspelled
da: comma missing an: should be at the end
dich: dative, should be dir
för : should be für ein: accusative, should be einen war : should be ist
should be Rufst du mir morgen an? habe: should be bin er geht : should be geht er dich: dative, should be dir
mehr : should be left out för : should be für Mir geht es: should be Es geht mir
da: should be a conjunction an: wrong preposition gestern: should be at the start er geht : should be at the start dich: dative, should be dir
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Sentence 1 2 3
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect incorrect
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect
Sentence
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect correct incorrect incorrect correct incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Sentence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect incorrect incorrect correct incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect incorrect
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence för : should be für Mir geht es schlecht : should be Es geht mir schlecht ein: accusative, should be einen Der Brief : object, should be den Brief da: should be at the start separated by a comma an: preposition, should be im habe: should be bin er geht : should be geht er dich: dative, should be dir
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence för : should be für ein: should be einen should be Der Brief wurde Brief wurde von mir geschrieben. an morgen: should be am Morgen habe: should be bin er geht : should be geht er dich: should be dir
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence för : wrong verkältet : wrong prefix ein: wrong da: wrong an: wrong habe: wrong er geht : wrong dich: wrong
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Sentence 1 2 3 4
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect correct incorrect
5 6 7 8 9 10
incorrect correct correct correct correct incorrect
Sentence 1 2 3 4 5 6
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect incorrect incorrect correct correct correct incorrect
7 8 9 10
correct incorrect correct correct
Sentence
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect incorrect incorrect correct correct correct correct incorrect incorrect
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence för : should be für ein: direct object in accusative case, should be einen worden: should be left out
dich: dative, should be dir
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence kein Geld mehr : should be kein mehr Geld för : should be für
da spricht : verb not in second place, should be spricht da habe: should be bin
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence för : should be für ich habe: should be habe ich ein: should be einen
er geht : should be geht er dich: should be dir
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Sentence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Marked sentence as correct/incorrect correct incorrect incorrect incorrect correct incorrect correct correct incorrect correct
Proposed correction of incorrect sentence
Question 2 Translation Students were asked to translate the following text from their native language into German. Sabine is a 23 years old student s tudent from Germany. Her family has a farm house in the country but their house will be sold next year. Her father is an engineer and her mother a teacher. Sabine studies mathematics mathematics at the university in Munich. She has been living in Munich for nearly four years. Sabine has a small room in an apartment, which she shares with her friends. During the summer holidays she is going to go to Spain and live by the sea because she loves swimming. She has never been to Spain before.
Answers Finnish-speaking students:
Sabine ist ein 23 jähriges Student aus Deutschland. Ihre Familie haben ein … aber ihres Hause wird an nächsten Jahr verkaufen. Ihr Vater ist ein ingeniour und ihre Mutter eine Lehrerin. Sie studiert Mathematics Mathematics an der universität Munchens. Sie hat in Munchen vier Jahr gewohnt. Sabine hat ein kleines Raum in … das sie mit ihrer Freunde teilt. In
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Sommarferien Sommarferien plant sie nach Spanien fahren und an der Ocean wohnen, weil sie zu swimmen… Sie hat niemals Spanien besuchtet. Sabine ist eine 23-jährige Studentin aus Deutschland. Ihre Familie hat… Sabine ist 23-jahre Schülerinnen auf Deutschland. Ihrem Familie habe der Farm in der land, aber Ihren Hause kaufen nächstes Jahr. Seinem Vater ist Ingenör und seinem Mutter ist Lehrerinnen. Sie studiert Mathe in dem Höchschule in München. Sie hat vier Jahre in München gewohnt. Sabine hat kleinem rum in dem Hause, welcher sie wohnt mit seinem Freund. In Sommerurlaubt sie denkt nach Espanja gehen und wohn near der See weil sie simmar gärna. Sie hat nicht früher in dem Spanien besuchten. Sabine ist 23-jahrige Schulerinnen von Deutschland. Ihre Familie hat ein Farm … aber ihr Haus wird verkauft an nächstes Jahre. Ihr Vater ist … und Mutter Lehrer. Sie studiert Mathe in Münchens Universitet. Sie hat in München vier Jahre gewohnt. Sabine hat ein klein Zimmer in Wohnung, das sie mit ihren Freundinnen … Sie will nach Spanien fahren und bei den Seen leben weil swimmen macht ihr viel Spaß. Sie hat nie Spanien besucht. Sabine ist en 23-jähriger Student aus Deutschland. Seiner Familj hat ein Bauenhaus … aber eure Haus würde nächstes Jahr … Sein Vater ist … und Mutter Lehrerin. Sie studiert Mathe in München Uni. Sie hat in München schon vier Jahre gewohnt. Sabine hat ein kleines Zimmer in seine Wohnung, die sie mit seinen Freundinnen mitteilt. In Sommer würde sie nach Spanien fahren und an dem See wohnen, weil sie leben schwimmen. Sie hat … in Spanien besucht. Sabine ist 23-jährige Student aus Deutschland. Ihre Familie haben ein ... Ihre Vater ist ... und ihre Mutter ist Lehrerin. Sie studieren Mathematik in München Universität. Sie hat in München ganz vier Jahren gewohnt ... Sabine ist ein 23 jahrige Student aus Deutschland. Seine Familie haben ... auf der Land, aber ihre Haus wurden am nächsten Jahre ...sein Vater ist ... und seine Mutter ist Lehrerin. Sie studiert Mathematisch in Münchens Universität. Sie habt ... Sabine ist eine 23 Jahre alt Studentin aus Deutschland. Ihre Familie hat ... aber ihr Hause wird nächstes Jahr verkaufen. Ihr Vater ist Insinör und ihre Mutter ist Lährerin. Sie studiert Mathematik in Münchens Universitet. Sie hat in Münchencirka vier Jahre gewohnt. Sabine hat ein klein Raum in die Wohnung, der sie mit ihre Freundinnen ... In
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dem Sommarferien wird sie in Spanien fahren und bei dem See wohnen, weil Schwimmen sie gefällt. Sie hat niemals früher Spanien besuchen. Sabine ist ein 23-jahrig Studenten von Deutschland. Ihren Familie haben ... aber ihren Hause in nexten Jahren ... Sein Vater ist ein Insinör und sein Mutter ist ein Lehrerin. Sie studentet Mathematicks Mathematicks in Universitet in München. Sie hat h at in München vier Jahren gewohnt. Sabine hat ein kleine Rum in ... das sie mit dem Freundinnen scheren ... Sabine ist ein 23 Jahre alt Student aus Deutschland. Ihre Familie hat eine Farm auf Land, aber ihr Haus wird nächste Jahr verkauft. Ihr Vater ist Ingenier und ihre Mutter Lehrer. Sie studiert Mathematik in Munchen Universitet. Sie hat in Munchen vier Jahre gewohnt. Sabine hat ein kleines Zimmer in dem Wohnung Wohnu ng das sie mit ihren Freunden ... Im Sommer wird sie nach Spanien reisen und ... weil sie schwimmen mag. Sie hat nicht Spanienbesucht. Sabine ist 23 Jahre alt Stüdentin aus Deutschland. Ihre Familie hat Landesblaan auf dem Land. Ihr Vater ist Ingeniur und ihre Mutter ist Lehrerin. Sie studiert Mathematik in Universitet in München. Sie ist in Munchen vier Jahre gelebt. Sabine hat ein kleines Zimmer in Wohnung, die sie mit seiner Freundinnen teilen. Im Sommerferien wird sie nach Spanien fahren und auf der Strand wohnen, weil die Schwimmen ihr gefällt. Sie hat nie früher in Spanien besuchen. Sabine ist 23 Jahre alt Stüdentin aus Deutschland. Ihre Familie hat ... Ihr Vater ist Ingeniur und ihre Muter ist Lehrerin. Sie studiert Mathematik in Universitet in München. Sie ist in München vier Jahre gelebt. Sabine hat ein kleines Zimmer in Wohnung, die sie mit seiner Freundinnen teilen. In Sommerferien wird sie nach Spanien fahren und auf der Strand wohnen, weil die Schwimmen ihr gefällt. Sie hat nie früher nach Spanien gefährt. Sabine ist 23-jahre allt Studenten aus Deutschland. Ihre familj hat ein ... Ihr Vater ist ein ingenjör und ihr Mutter ist ein Lehrer. Sie studiert Matematik Matematik in Universitet in München. Sie hat in München vier jahre ... Sabine hat ein klein Zimmer in die Wohnung, die teilt sie mit seiner Freunde ... will sie nach Spanien gehen und bei der Strande ... Sie hat nie früher nach Spanien besuchen. Sabine ist 23-Jahre alt Studenten aus Deutschland. Ihre Familje habe ein ... aber ihre hause kaufen Jahren. Ihre Vater ist Insinöör und ihre Mutter ist Lehrer. Sie studenten mathematik in München University nach vier Jahre. Sabine hat eine kleine ... in Wohnung und wochne zusammen seine Freundinen ...
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Sabine ist 23 jahre alt Schülerin auf Deutschland. Seinen Familie hat ... Sie hat in Mnchen ganz vier Jahre gewohnt. Sabine ist 23-jährig Studenten aus Deutschland. Ihren Familj haben ein Haus aus landet, men ihres Hause nächstes Jahre gesoltet ... Sie hat Mathematik aus München studiert. Sie hat aus München vieviel vier Jahre geleben. Sabine hat ein klein Rum Ru m ins Legenhet, dass Sie mit seinem Freund ... Sabine ist ein 23 Jahre alt Student und sie kommt aus Deutschland. Ihren Familie hat ein ... aber ihren Hause im nächsten Jahre gekauft wird. Ihr Vater ist ... und ihre Mutter Lehrerin. Sie studiert Mathematik in die Universitet Münchens. Sie hat in München vier Jahre gewohnt. Sabine hat ein kleines Raum in die Wohnung, die sie mit ihrer Freunde zahlen. In die Sommerferien ... sie nach Spanien reisen und bei See wohnen weil sie ... Sie hat ... in Spanien ... ... (one student did not make an attempt to translate the text)
English-speaking students:
Sabine ist eine dreiundzwanzigjährige Studentin aus Deutschland. Ihre Familie hat ein Bauernhaus auf dem Land, aber ihr Haus wird nächstes Jahr verkauft werden. Ihr Vater ist Ingenieur und ihre Mutter ist Lehrerin. Sabine studiert Mathematik an der Universität in München. Sie wohnt seit fast vier Jahren in München. Sabine hat ein kleines Zimmer in einer Wohnung, die sie mit ihren Freunden teilt. Während der Sommerferien wird sie nach Spanien fahren und sie wird ganz in der Nähe von dem Meer wohnen da sie sehr gern schwimmt. Sie ist noch nie in Spanien gewesen. Sabine ist ein 23 jahrige Studentin aus Deutschland. Ihre Familie hat ein Haus auf dem Land, aber ihre Haus wird nächsten Jahr verkauft. Ihrer Vater ist Ingeniur und ihre Mutter ist Lehrerin. Sabine studiert Mathe an der Universität München. Sie hat fast vier Jahre in München gewohnt. Sabine hat eine kleines Zimmer in einer Wohnung, Wohnun g, der sie mit ihren Freundinnen verteilt. Während den Sommer Ferien, wird sie nach Spanien gehen und am Meer wohnen weil sie schwimmen gehen mag. Sie ist noch nie nach Spanien gegangen. Sabine ist eine Studentin aus Deutschland, die 23 Jahre alt ist. Ihre Familie hat ein Haus auf dem Land aber es wird nächstes Jahr verkauft. Ihr Vater ist ein Engineer und ihre Mutter ist eine Lehrerin. Sabine studiert Mathe auf die Uni in München. Mün chen. Sie hat schon seit vier Jahren in München gewohnen. Sabine hat ein kleines Zimmer in einer Wohnung, das mit ihren Freunden geteilt ist. Während der Sommerferien fährt sie nach Spanien und sie wird an die Kuste leben, weil sie Schwimmen liebt. Sie hat nie nach Spanien gefahren. 92
Sabine ist eine 23 jährige Studentin aus Deutschland. Ihre Familie hat ein Bauernhaus auf dem Land, aber ihr Haus wird nächstes Jahr verkauft werden. Ihr Vater ist Ingenuer und ihre Mutter ist Lehrerin. Sabine studiert Mathematik an der Universität in München. Sie wohnte seit vier Jahren in München. Sabine hat ein kleines Zimmer in einer Wohnung, die sie mit ihren Freunden teilt. Während der Sommerferien wird sie nach Spanien reisen, und neben des Meer leben, weil sie das Schwimmen liebt. Sie hat Spanien noch nicth besucht. Sabine ist eine 23 Jahrige Studentin und sie kommt aus Deutschland. Seine Familie hat ein Bauerhaus in die Landschaft, aber ihre Haus wird nachstes n achstes Jahr verkauft worden. Seinem Vater ist Ingineer und seiner Mutter ist Lehrerin. Sabine studiert Mathe an der Uni von Munich. Sie wohnt in Munich seit vier Jahren. J ahren. Sabine hat eine kleine Zimmer in einer Wohnung, der sie mit seinen freundinnen teilt. Während der Sommerferien Sommerferien wird sie nach Spanien gehen und sie wird in der Nähe von dem See wohnen, weil sie Schwimmen liebt. Sie ist niemals vorher nach Spanien gefahren. Sabine ist eine dreiundswanzig jahrige Studentin aus Deutschland. Ihre Familie hat ein Bauernhaus auf dem Land aber es würde nächsten Jahr verkauft. v erkauft. Ihr Vater ist ein ... und ihre Mutti ist eine Lehrerin. Sabine studiert Mathe auf der Uni in München. Sie wohnt in München seit fast 4 Jahren. Sabine hat ein kleines Zimmer in einer wohnung, die sie teilt mit ihren freunden. Während die Sommerferien fährt sie nach Spanien und sie wohnt in der Nähe von der See, weil sie schwimmen liebt. Sie war noch nicht in Spanien. Sabine ist eine dreiundzwanzigjahrige Studentin aus Deutschland. Seine Familie hat ein Bauernhaus auf dem Land aber ihr Haus wird nächstes Jahr verkauft. Sein Vater ist ein ... und seine Mutter ist eine Lehrerin. Sabine studiert Mathematik an der Universität in München. Sie hat seit rund vier Jahren in München gewohnt. Sabine hat ein kleines Zimmer in einer Wohnung, die sie mit Freunden teilt. Während der Sommerferien, wird sie in Spanien ... in der Nähe von der See wohnen wohn en weil sie Schwimmen liebt. Sie war schonmal nicht in Spanien gewesen. Sabine, die von Deutschland kommt, ist 23 Jahre alt. Ihre Familie haben ein Bauhaus auf dem Land, das im nächsten Jahr verkauft v erkauft wird. Ihrer Vater ist ein Ingineur und Ihre Mutter ist eine Lehrerin. Sie studiert Mathematik im Universitat in München. Seit vier Jahren hat sie in München gewohnt. Sabine hat eine kleine Zimmer in einer Wohnung, dass sie mit Ihre Freunden verteilt. Durch die Sommerferien wird sie nach Spanien fahren und bei der See wohnen, weil sie Schwimmen mag. Früher war sie nie in Spanien.
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Sabine ist eine dreiundzwanzig jährige Studentin aus Deutschland. Seine Familie hat ein Ackerhaus auf dem Land, aber es wird nächstes Jahr verkäuft werden. Ihr Vater ist ein Engineur und ihre Mutter ist eine Lehrerin. Sabine studiert Mathematik Mathematik auf der Universität in München. Sie wohnt in München seit fast vier Jahren. Sabine hat ein kleines Zimmer in einem Apartment, die sie mit seinen Freunden teilt. Während der Sommerferien Sommerferien wird sie nach Spanien gehen und am Strand leben, weil sie Schwimmen liebt. Sie ist noch nie naqch Spanien gefahren. Sabine ist eine 23 Jahre alt Studenten aus Deutschland. Ihre Familie haben ein Haus auf dem Land, aber seinen Haus werden verkaufen will. Ihr Vater ist einen ... und ihre Mutter ist eine Lehrerin. Sabine studiert Mathe an der Universität München. Sie seit 4 Jahren wird in München wohnen. Sabine hat ein kleines Raum in einem Appartment, da sie wohnt mit ... In dem Sommerferien wird sie ... Sabine ist eine dreizwanzige Studentin aus Deutschland. Ihre Familien hat ein Bauerhaus auf dem Land, aber es wird nächste Jahr verkauft werden. Ihrer Vater ist Ingeniuer und ihre Mutter ist Lehrerin. Sabine studiert Mathematik auf der Universität in Münich. Sie hatte seit vier Jahren in Münich gewohnt. Sie hat h at einen kleinen Schlafzimmer in einer Wohnung, die sie mit ihren Freunden teilt. Wahrend der Sommerferien wird sie nach Spanien fahren und sie wird am Meer leben weil sie Schwimmen lebt. Sie war noch nicht im Spanien. Sabine ist eine 23-jährige Studentin aus Deutschland. Ihre Familie hat eine Bauerhaus in der Landschaft, aber ihr Haus wird nächstes Jahr verkauft gewerden. Ihr Vater ist Hand und seine Mutter Lehrerin. Sabine studiert Mathe in der Uni in München. Sie wohnt vor fast vier Jahre in München. Sabine hat ein kleines Zimmer in ihrer Wohnung, die sie mit ihren Freunden teilt. Während den Sommerferien, fährt sie nach Spanien um in der Nähe von dem See zu wohnen, wohn en, weil sie gern schwimmt. Sie hatte Spanien niemals besucht. Sabine is ein 23 Jahre alter Student aus Deutschland. Ihre Familie hat einen Bauernhof auf dem Land, aber es wird im nächsten Jahr verkauft. Ihr Vater is ein Ingenieur un ihre Mutter eine Lehrerin. Sabine studiert Mathematik an der Universität von München. Sie lebt jetzt schon für fast vier Jahr in München. Sabine hat ein kleines Zimmer in einer Wohnung die sie mit ihre Freunden teilt. In den Sommerferien wird sie nach Spanien gehen und am Meer leben da sie es liebt zu schwimmen. Ist ist bis jetzt noch nie in Spanien gewesen. Sabine ist eine 23 Jahre alt Student aus Deutschland. Ihre Familie haben einen Farmhouse auf dem Land aber ihren Haus werden nachste Jahre verkauft. Ihre Vater ist einen ... und ihre Mutter eine Lehrerin. Sabine lernt Mathe am University in München. Sie wohnt seit fast vier Jahre in München. Sabine hat ein kleine Zimmer in ein Wohnung, dass sie mit
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ihre Freundinnen teilt. Während die Sommerferien fährt sie nach Spanien und wohnt bei die See weil sie liebt sie See. Sie war nicht vor in Spanien. Sabine ist eine dreiundzwanzig jahrige Studentin aus Deutschland. Ihre Familie haben einen Haus auf dem Land, aber seinen Haus nachsten n achsten Jahr verkauft werden. Ihre Vater ist ein ... und ihre Mutter eine Lehrerin. Sabine lernt Mathamatik an der Uni in München. Sie wohnt seit vier Jahre in München. Sabine hat ein kleines Zimmer in einer Wohnung, die sie mit seine Freunden teilt. Während die Sommerefrien fahren sie nach Spanien und dort wohnen sie an der Kuste denn sie liebt Schwimmen. Sie geht nicht nach Spannien. Sabine ist ein 23 jahre alt. Sie ist eine Studentinnen auf Deutschland. Ihre Familie hat ... Ihre Mutter ist eine Lehrerinnen. Sabine studieren Mathe an die Universität in Munchen. Sie lebt in Munchen seit 4 Jahren. Sabine hat eine kleines Zimmer auf ihre ... und un d sie musst mit ihrer Freundinnen teilt. Während die Sommer Urlaub sie nach Spannien fahren werden und sie werden bei dem Meer leben, weil sie schwimmen liebt. Sie sind nicht im Spannien vor ... Sabine ist eine 23 Jahre Alt Studentin nach Deutschland. Seine Familie haben ein Haus auf dem Land aber das Haus wird nextes Jahr verkaufen. Seine Vater ist ein Ingenieur und seine Mutti ist eine Lehrerin. Sabine studiert Mathe an einer Universität in München. Sie hat eine kleine Zimmer in einer Wohnung ... Während die Sommerferien, wird sie nach Spanien gefahren und in der d er Nähe des Sees gewohnt. Sie liebt schwimmen. Sie hat auf keine Zeit Spanien besuchen. b esuchen.
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