Pedagogical Linguistics - Online First

In the present article I investigated whether data obtained from 7-year-old German L1 and German-Turkish eL2 children by means of an elicited imitation task including grammatical and ungrammatical sentences mirrored current findings in acquisition research concerning case marking, adjective inflection, V2 position and finiteness. The results show that L1 children have full mastery of all four phenomena, as they revealed a greater tendency to correct ungrammatical sentences than to introduce errors into grammatical sentences. On the other hand, eL2 children differed from L1 children in terms of how they dealt with the noun-related phenomena, as they did not reveal a clear preference for either changing grammatical items or correcting ungrammatical items. In the discussion, I propose how to minimise the likelihood that participants simply repeat ungrammatical items verbatim in further imitation studies and be thus able to collect more reliable data on their grammatical knowledge. The article ends with a proposal for a primary school exercise on case marking that involves correcting errors on case marking. The suggestion is that ungrammatical sentences can be used in grammar teaching to assess pupils’ linguistic knowledge and also to guide their attention to specific regularities of the language, thus stimulating language reflection.

English as a Foreign Language (EFL) materials have often been criticized for a lack of authenticity. However, their direct impact on learner language has rarely been assessed. We compare pedagogical input from EFL and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) materials to texts produced by learners taught via the textbooks in question. The analysis of corpus data showed that EFL textbooks did not systematically differ from CLIL materials in terms of conditional frequency and verb forms combinations. No significant difference was detected for CLIL and non-CLIL learner texts either. Both groups did, however, deviate from novice native writing in that conditionals expressing low hypotheticality were overrepresented while conditionals expressing a higher level of hypotheticality were underrepresented and frequently erroneous. Misrepresentations revealed for EFL textbooks in previous research were found to match the deviations in learner language in a way that aids L2 development rather than impairing it. Hence, fundamental changes are not required, even though more studies should be undertaken to investigate the direct impact of teaching materials on learner output.