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Differences in the Acquisition and Production of English as a Foreign Language: A Study of Bilingual and Monolingual Students in Germany

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Book cover International Research on Multilingualism: Breaking with the Monolingual Perspective

Part of the book series: Multilingual Education ((MULT,volume 35))

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to look for differences between second language and third language acquisition and to assess the notion of multilingual advantages. We investigate the use of the progressive aspect in a written picture description task by 209 school-aged monolingual and bilingual learners of English. The results point to the possibility of cross-linguistic influence from both previously acquired languages in third language acquisition, since production patterns could be identified that can be explained with transfer from the majority language German and the heritage languages Russian, Turkish and Vietnamese. The study does not support a general multilingual advantage that would result in an overall more target-like performance of the bilingual participants in comparison with the monolingual learners; yet, individual benefits from the heritage languages could be revealed. Knowledge of previously acquired languages—besides other influencing factors such as social status, educational opportunities and intelligence—shapes the acquisition of other languages.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Most of the data used for the current project was collected within the LiMA cluster at the University of Hamburg (Linguistic Diversity Management in Urban Areas, 2009–2013). The financial support of the Behörde für Wissenschaft und Forschung of Hamburg is gratefully acknowledged. The following researchers and students were involved in the data collection process: Simone Lechner, Sharareh Rahbari, Jessica Terese Müller, Mark Gerken.

  2. 2.

    Some might argue that we find indications of grammaticalization in German. Even though it is not obligatory in German, we find constructions that are particularly common and serve in some contexts and with certain (intransitive) verbs as markers of progressive aspect. This is especially apparent in some regions, namely southern German varieties and those close to the Netherlands (König and Gast 2012, p. 94). Yet, the status of the progressive in English is undeniably different from German.

  3. 3.

    Note that the form of the suffix, i.e., either -(i)yor, -(ı)yor, -(ü)yor or -(u)yor, and either -makta or -mekte, depends on the preceding vowel or consonant following vowel harmony rules (see Göksel and Kerslake 2005, p. 21–25; Jendraschek 2011, p. 251–253).

  4. 4.

    Here, the vowel ı of the suffix -(ı)yor gets deleted because it clashes with the preceding final vowel ı; therefore, only the suffix -yor is added (see Jendraschek (2011, p. 252) for further explanations).

  5. 5.

    Strictly speaking, the data does not allow for drawing any conclusions about the acquisition process of English because we are only able to access the children’s written responses; hence, we can only analyze their performance. We do, however, want to keep the term acquisition because we are able to present results about their current status of the acquisition of English.

  6. 6.

    We are aware that it is not uncontroversial to compare the performance of learners of English with a native speaker norm (see for example Granger 2015, p. 11–18). However, we include a novice-native speaker baseline (as opposed to an adult, expert-native speaker baseline) to have one point of reference, since the current curriculum in German schools (still) aims at reaching native speaker proficiency.

  7. 7.

    In fact, research has shown that German learners of English often use the progressive aspect in situations where the simple form would be more adequate because the progressive aspect is stressed as something noteworthy in their English classes; therefore, German students of English were reported to overuse instead of not using the progressive aspect (Dose-Heidelmayer and Götz 2016, p. 242).

  8. 8.

    All following examples were taken from the E-LiPS data set.

  9. 9.

    All following association plots were created with the statistics program R (R Development Core Team 2016). This function allows to look at two variables independently and to test their power of attraction. The outcome is given in a plot with bars. The size of the bars (height and width), the orientation (either above or below zero) and the color of the bars (the darker the color, the higher the associations) show the power of attraction. The results can be interpreted like a chi-squared test: The p-value and the residuals are given. The p-value shows whether the plot is significant or not, and the residuals show how high the attraction of this variable is; above the line indicates that the variable appears more often than expected, the opposite is the case for bars that go downwards. Hence, by looking at the squares, one can see if this variable is (significantly) over or under represented for each form separately. For further information see Levshina (2015) or the help function in R.

  10. 10.

    The English students are not included because they all come from one school, an international school in Hamburg, with a high level of education.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of English and American Studies, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Eliane Lorenz & Peter Siemund

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  1. Eliane Lorenz
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Correspondence to Eliane Lorenz or Peter Siemund .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Teacher Education, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Eva Vetter

  2. Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Eva Vetter

  3. Department of English, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Tyrol, Austria

    Ulrike Jessner

  4. Department of Applied Linguistics (Multilingualism Doctoral School), University of Pannonia, Veszprém, Hungary

    Ulrike Jessner

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Lorenz, E., Siemund, P. (2019). Differences in the Acquisition and Production of English as a Foreign Language: A Study of Bilingual and Monolingual Students in Germany. In: Vetter, E., Jessner, U. (eds) International Research on Multilingualism: Breaking with the Monolingual Perspective. Multilingual Education, vol 35. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21380-0_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21380-0_6

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