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Una de las metas de aprendizaje establecidas en el Marco Común Europeo de Referencia para las lenguas (MCER) es el desarrollo de la competencia sociolingüística en los aprendientes de lenguas extranjeras. A través de esta competencia se pretende conseguir que los aprendientes realicen un uso social correcto de la lengua meta, siendo conscientes de las distintas variedades lingüísticas y registros que la componen y de las dimensiones sociales que en ella aparecen. El presente artículo tiene como objetivo fomentar la competencia sociolingüística en el alumnado de alemán como lengua extranjera a través del tratamiento de la variedad lingüística del multietnolecto alemán. Por un lado, se mostrará el origen, desarrollo e implicaciones sociales del multietnolecto. Por otro lado, se discutirán los beneficios de introducir la variedad en el aula y se establecerán las pautas para su tratamiento.   

This article reports on a study involving first-year modern foreign languages students enrolled in German degree courses at two major universities in the United Kingdom. It explores the experience of these students from a motivational angle. A longitudinal mixed-methods approach was employed in order to address the time- and context-sensitive nature of motivational attributes. The data suggest that despite students' increasing wish to become proficient in German, their effort to engage with language learning decreased over the course of the year. This change occurred in conjunction with decreasing levels of intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy beliefs. The relationships between motivational changes and contextual factors in higher education are discussed against the backdrop of students' transition experience from school to university. The article concludes by outlining pedagogical suggestions for how to counteract decreasing motivation of modern foreign languages students during their first year university studies.

The present study introduces affective norms for a set of 880 German words rated by learners of German as a second language (L2), i.e., the Affective Norms for German as a Second Language (ANGL2). The database provides ratings across affective and subjective psycholinguistic dimensions. Besides valence and arousal ratings, ANGL2 features data on emotional prototypicality, which helps to identify emotion-label words and emotion-laden words. Moreover, the database includes two additional semantic variables: concreteness and familiarity. We observed similarities with previous studies, and the ratings provided by L2 speakers demonstrate characteristics that should be noted in studies involving bilinguals, including more moderate valence ratings, and a stronger correlation between valence and arousal, specifically for positive words. ANGL2 is the first set of affective norms that has been rated by L2 speakers for a language other than English. The set of norms is aimed to function as a resource for psycholinguistic experimental studies on the intersection between emotion and language among L2 speakers.

This article investigates how lexical and syntactic differences in L1 and L2 grammatical gender affect L2 predictive gender processing. In a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, 24 L1 Russian adult learners and 15 native speakers of German were tested. Both Russian and German have three gender classes. Yet, they differ in lexical congruency, that is, whether a noun (“house”) is assigned to the same or a different gender class. Further, gender is syntactically realized on postnominal suffixes in Russian but on prenominal articles in German. For adjectives, both Russian and German mark gender on suffixes. In predictive gender processing, we find interactions of proficiency and congruency for gender-marked articles. Advanced L2 learners show nativelike gender prediction throughout. High-intermediate learners display asymmetries according to syntactic and lexical congruency. Predictive gender processing obtains for all nouns in the (syntactically congruent) adjective condition, yet only for lexically congruent nouns in the (syntactically incongruent) article condition.

In order to identify the causes of inflectional variability in adult second-language (L2) acquisition, this study investigates lexical and syntactic aspects of gender processing in real-time L2 production and comprehension. Twenty advanced to near-native adult first language (L1) English speakers of L2 German and 20 native controls were tested in a study comprising two experiments. In elicited production, we probe accuracy in lexical gender assignment. In a visual-world eye tracking task, we test the predictive processing of syntactic gender agreement between determiners and nouns. The findings show clear contingencies (1) between overall accuracy in lexical gender assignment in production and target predictive processing of syntactic gender agreement in comprehension and (2) between the speed of lexical access and predictive syntactic gender agreement. These findings support lexical and computational accounts of L2 inflectional variability and argue against models positing representational deficits in morphosyntax in late L2 acquisition and processing.

In the present study, we examine the effects of prompts and recasts on the acquisition of two new and different grammar structures in a task-based learning environment. Sixty-four 14-year-old 9th grade students (low intermediate) learning German as a foreign language were randomly assigned to three conditions: two experimental groups (one receiving prompts, the other recasts) and a control group. The study involves two subsequent interventions: The first targeted a complex structure, dative case after a preposition; the second a simple structure, comparatives. Pretests, immediate posttests, and delayed posttests included written and oral accuracy as well as oral fluency. Statistical comparisons on both written and oral posttests showed that prompts and recasts were effective, when compared to the control group, with prompts being superior to recasts. Furthermore, the effect of recasts depended on the structure: Recasts were more effective for the comparative than for the dative on written accuracy.

Research on data-driven learning (DDL), or teaching and learning languages with the help of electronic corpora, has shown that it is both effective and efficient. Nevertheless, DDL is still far from common pedagogical practice, not least because the empirical research on it is still limited and narrowly focused. This study addresses some gaps in that research by exploring the effectiveness of DDL for teaching low-proficiency learners lexico-grammatical constructions (verb-preposition collocations) in German, a morphologically rich language. The study employed a pretest-posttest design with intact third- and fourth-semester classes for German as a foreign language at a US university. The same collocations were taught to each group during one class period, with one group at each course level taking a paper-based DDL lesson with concordance lines from a native-speaker corpus and the other one taking a traditional rule-based lesson with textbook exercises. These constructions were new to third-semester students, whereas fourth-semester students had been exposed to them in the previous semester. The results show that, whereas the DDL method and the traditional method were both effective and resulted in lexical and grammatical gains, DDL was more effective for teaching new collocations. The study thus argues in favor of using paper-based DDL in the classroom at lower proficiency levels and for languages other than English.

Here we report findings from a cross-sectional study of morphosyntactic processing in native German speakers and native English speakers enrolled in college-level German courses. Event-related brain potentials were recorded while participants read sentences that were either well-formed or violated German subject–verb agreement. Results showed that grammatical violations elicited large P600 effects in the native Germans and learners enrolled in third-year courses. Grand mean waveforms for learners enrolled in first-year courses showed a biphasic N400–P600 response. However, subsequent correlation analyses revealed that most individuals showed either an N400 or a P600, but not both, and that brain response type was associated with behavioral measures of grammatical sensitivity. These results support models of second language acquisition which implicate qualitative changes in the neural substrates of second language grammar processing associated with learning. Importantly, we show that new insights into L2 learning result when the cross-subject variability is treated as a source of evidence rather than a source of noise.

Understanding common errors that students of a foreign language make and their causes can enhance our ability to adjust teaching methodologies. This paper aimed to analyze errors that Albanian students of German language and literature make when writing texts in German as a foreign language. This qualitative and quantitative analysis set out to identify and classify errors and find the causes of errors. The study is based on 100 students of German at the B1 level, including participants from language schools and first-year students from the German Department at the University of Prishtina “Hasan Prishtina”. Students were required to submit written texts for analysis. The analysis of these texts was used to address the following research question: What are the typical and recurrent errors made by learners of German as a foreign language (GFL) and what are their causes? The analysis of written texts showed that errors occur at all linguistic levels, with grammatical errors being the most common, followed by orthography and punctuation and syntax. Most errors arose from interference between the native Albanian and the foreign language English, followed by competence and overgeneralization.

This study investigates constraints on ultimate attainment in second language (L2) pronunciation in a direct comparison of perceived foreign accent of 40 late L2 learners and 40 late first language (L1) attriters of German. Both groups were compared with 20 predominantly monolingual controls. Contrasting participants who acquired the target language from birth (monolinguals, L1 attriters) with late L2 learners, on the one hand, and bilinguals (L1 attriters, L2ers) with monolinguals, on the other hand, allowed us to disentangle the impacts of age of onset and bilingualism in speech production. At the group level, the attriters performed indistinguishably from controls, and both differed from the L2 group. However, 80% of all L2ers scored within the native (attriter) range. Correlational analyses with background factors further found some effects of use and language aptitude. These results show that acquiring a language from birth is not sufficient to guarantee nativelike pronunciation, and late acquisition does not necessarily prevent it. The results are discussed in the light of models on the role of age and cross-linguistic influence in L2 acquisition.