Vom Nutzen der Zweitspracherwerbsforschung für die Ausbildung von Lehrerinnen und Lehrern

Abstract

This article proposes that the findings of research on second language acquisition can give teachers valuable insights into the structure and process of language acquisition, thus informing their didactic decisions. The article outlines recent findings on the acquisition of word order and the production of noun phrases and reviews some of the general factors that characterize second language acquisition in children and adolescents. Empirical findings show that some key syntactic patterns are acquired more quickly and successfully in early second language acquisition than in adulthood, whereas gender and case marking in the target language are characterized by more protracted, though generally also systematic, processes of acquisition.