Volume 61, Issue 3

This paper had two aims: a) to provide a review of studies investigating how children with migration backgrounds perform in tests examining their skills in the majority language of a country as well as their skills in a 3rd language learnt either in regular language-as-subjects lessons or in bilingual programmes such as those following the immersion approach, and b) to present the results of a pilot study investigating how primary school children with and without migration backgrounds enrolled in a partial immersion programme in Germany performed in tests examining their skills in the ambient language German and in the immersion language English. The review of previous research suggested that compared to children without a migration back-ground, children with a migration background living in Germany often achieve relatively poor results in studies examining their skills in the ambient language German. In studies examining migrant children’s skills in a new language such as English learnt in foreign language classrooms or in a bilingual secondary school setting, students with migrant backgrounds have, on the other hand, sometimes been found to perform equally well as or even better than students without a migration back-ground. However, there is a paucity of studies examining migrant children’s academic achievement in primary schools with bilingual programmes. The pilot study pre-sented here examined children in primary grades 1 to 4 who were enrolled in a partial immersion programme in Germany and who participated in tests examining their cognitive abilities, their literacy skills in the ambient language German and the immersion language English as well as their comprehension of English vocabulary and grammar. The results obtained in the different tests suggest that primary school immersion programmes may not only be suitable for children without, but also for children with migration backgrounds, including children with migration back-grounds whose parents are less inclined to education.

A central challenge for learners of English is discovering verbs’ argument structure privileges; for example which verbs may appear in the figure-locative but not the ground locative construction (e.g. Lisa poured water into the cup/ *Lisa poured the cup with water), which show the opposite pattern (e.g. *Lisa filled water into the cup/ Lisa filled the cup with water), and which may appear in both (e.g. Lisa sprayed water onto the flowers/ Lisa sprayed the flowers with water). This study investigated how adult L1 German learners of L2 English acquire these restrictions, in the face of potential transfer effects from a similar - but subtly different - pattern in the L1. The study took the form of a replication of a previous grammaticality judgment study conducted with native-speaking adults. The findings provide some evidence that, like L1 learners, advanced L2 leaners use the fit between verb and construction semantics to acquire verbs’ argument structure restrictions. Unlike L1 learners, how-ever, they did not display any evidence of spontaneously using surface-based “inference-from-absence” processes such as entrenchment and pre-emption. We end by offering some potential learning and teaching strategies for L2 learners of English.

The role of L1 transfer in second language acquisition has been the focus of extensive research for decades (Gass 1988; Eubank 1993/1994; Schwartz and Sprouse 1994, 1996; Pienemann 1998, Pienemann et al. 2005a, Pienemann 2011) with transfer at the initial state being of particular interest. Competing approaches have been pro-posed to address this issue: Full Transfer/Full Access (FT/FA) (Schwartz and Sprouse 1994, 1996), partial transfer/full access (Vainikka and Young-Scholten 1996) minimal transfer/full access (Platzack 1996) and the Developmentally Moderated Transfer Hypothesis (DMTH) (Pienemann 1998, Pienemann et al. 2005a) to name some of the key approaches. The debate on the initial state includes the issue of access to the L1 grammatical system.

This paper focuses on the controversies surrounding the effect of linguistic input in language acquisition and investigates how learning of a dialectal pattern, a-prefixing in Appalachian English, can be modulated by positive vs. negative evidence in adult learners whose grammar does not contain this grammatical phenomenon. In an online acceptability judgment study, we measured gradient grammatical intuitions of 41 Appalachian English and 36 native speakers of American English on their perceived acceptability of carefully-matched grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with a-prefixing. We used 16 sentences (50% ungrammatical) for each of the 5 previously established constraints on a-prefixing, divided equally into a pre- and post-test session. The non-dialect speakers were further divided into 3 input groups depending on the type of input they received between the two tests: the positive-evidence group with only grammatical instances of a-prefixing, the negative-evidence group with explicit instruction concerning only ungrammaticality, and the control group with no input. Results indicated that, just like the baseline Appalachian English group, the non-dialect participants were able to distinguish grammatical sentences from ungrammatical ones, crucially in all of the 5 different constraints, prior to the treatment, although they significantly differed from the Appalachian English group in the strength of their judgments. The post-test results revealed a clear benefit of negative evidence on the learning of a novel grammatical phenomenon, albeit only concerning the responses to ungrammatical sentences, while accept-ability judgments for grammatical as well as ungrammatical sentences did not benefit from positive evidence alone. We suggest that the target-like intuitions of our non-dialect participants at the onset result from a deduction of tacitly known principles of English and linguistic universals. Concerning the differential effect of input categories on learning, we argue that exposure to only positive exemplars of the target phenomenon results in overly general hypotheses about its patterning in the language, which may push the learner to perceive new ungrammatical sentences better than their initial acceptability value. Negative exemplars, however, place a pressure on learners to notice the linguistic contexts in which the target phenomenon is not allowed to surface, thereby raising their awareness of the presence of rules.