Die fehleranalytische Relevanz der prädominanten Spracherwerbshypothesen

Abstract

TargetThe first objective of the work was to examine whether there are still errors which are typical for native speakers of German when learning English or whether the types of errors which are made by these learners have changed. The second objective of the work was to analyse the factors which caused these errors to be made. The error analysis was based on the three most important language acquisition hypotheses: the contrastive (linguistic factors), the L1 = L2 (developmental factors) and the interlanguage hypothesis (psychological factors).MethodThe results are based on a study which was carried out by the author of this work which differs decisively at certain points from preceding studies. The total number of participants was 868 - instead of the maximum of 50 which had previously been standard. The study comprised participants of different age groups, sex and educational background. The way the test was carried out ensured that a manipulation of the error types which were made could practically be excluded. In addition personality characteristics of the participants such as motivation, contacts with native speakers of English etc. were also taken into account.The error corpus was established by giving the participants a letter to write in English. The letter was based on five tasks which demanded the use of various grammatical constructions and tenses. The personality characteristics of the participants were elicited by means of a questionnaire.The letters were corrected by German linguists and by native speakers of English. The errors were subdivided into lexical, syntactical-morphological and orthographic categories. They were finally analyzed by the author of the work from the perspective of each of the three language acquisition hypotheses.ResultsThe analysis of the error results demonstrated that native speakers of German do indeed make characteristic errors when learning English which do not generally occur in the case of English learners of other native languages. These errors could be discerned in all groups regardless of age, sex, educational background or personality characteristics.Nevertheless a change in the occurrence in these characteristic errors can be observed. Traditional mistakes such as the wrong use of the verb 'to become' are only to be found in beginners groups. On the other hand error types such as the so-called false friends also occur in advanced groups. The errors made by these groups include the wrong use of words such as 'eventually', 'actually' or the preposition 'in'.The application of the three language acquisition hypotheses has demonstrated that they are generally speaking of equal importance. However their applicability was seen to vary within the individual linguistic categories. For example lexical errors cannot be attributed to developmental factors whereby the latter can be applied to the analysis of syntactical-morphological errors. Linguistic factors offer a plausible explanation for the occurrence of lexical errors, whereas syntactical-morphological errors can chiefly be ascribed to psychological factors.All in all the study revealed that the development of a universal theory applicable to learners of English with various native languages does not appear to be possible. The errors that occur are always determined by the students' native language and by the target language. Language acquisition and the errors which inevitably occur in the process are always also influenced by linguistic, developmental, and psychological factors and can only then be understood when all three factors are simultaneously taken into account.