Getting Closer to Native Speaker Competence: How Psycholinguistic Experiments Can Enrich Language Learning and Teaching

Abstract

In the foreign language classroom, various exercises are carried out to bring students closer to native speaker competence. In order to avoid interference mistakes, traditional language teaching strongly focuses on lexical and grammatical phenomena. By contrast, conceptual transfer (Jarvis 1998) has received little attention in foreign language teaching, although experimental research has shown that learners have a strong tendency to transfer the habitual conceptualization patterns of their native language to their L2 (Jarvis 1998; Stutterheim and Nüse 2003; Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008). In order to sensitize L2 learners to different conceptualization patterns and to promote their language awareness, we argue for an integration of psycholinguistic experiments into the foreign language classroom. In this paper we will present the results from a school project in Germany in order to show how psycholinguistic experiments can be methodologically integrated into foreign language teaching. By reducing experiments to the core and adapting them to classroom use, students learn new ways of thinking about language. The procedure raises metalinguistic awareness and improves students’ skills through learning about specific contrasts between languages. Knowledge about language-specific conceptualization patterns leads to the awareness that competent speakers of a foreign language, on the one hand, are able to produce grammatically correct utterances, which, on the other hand, often differ from native speakers’ utterances with regard to preferences reflected by the conceptualization patterns.