Page 51 - Diversity in Action

Transfer in Early Multilingual Acquisition

tively ready to produce a certain structure, the typological distance between
L1 and L2 does not necessarily hinder the learning process.

All That Transfers Is Not Glitter
Of course, there are contexts in which transfer does occur, i.e. when learn-
ers are developmentally ready. In some cases, the outcome will be positive,
in others, it will not. Concrete language material, abstract structures, and
meanings can be transferred from one language to another. In the case of
language material (sounds, words), we talk about matter borrowing, with ab-
stract structures at the syntactic or prosodic level about pattern borrowing,
and the transfer of meanings is usually referred to as semantic transfer (Riehl,
2014, p. 108).
However, as we will show, in some cases, what is transferred can be at a
more abstract representational level rather than at the superficial realisation
of the sentence. In other words, some instances of transfer may not be visible
directly in learners’ output, and it is the job of linguistic research to carefully
analyse learners’ productions.

L1–L2 Proximity with Positive Transfer
Positive transfer occurs at different linguistic levels, including grammar and
lexicon. It is important to foster positive transfer both at the receptive and
productive level. As regards reception, lexical similarities between Germanic,
Romance or Slavic languages can facilitate comprehension. Words with the
same roots that have a similar sound and (nearly) the same meaning are
called cognates. They are the basis of intercomprehension between lan-
guages belonging to the same family, i.e. of the ability to understand a word’s
meaning relying on a similar word in a different language (Hufeisen & Marx,
2014).
For children with German as a first language, it will thus be easy to under-
stand and acquire certain words in English L2 belonging to the semantic field
of family members, colours and animals such as brother (Ger. Bruder), green
(Ger.grün),bear (Ger.Bär),etc.Not allsimilaritiescan bedetectedat first sight,
as spelling or pronunciation can differ (e.g. Engl. cow is spelt with <c> while
Ger. Kuh is spelt with <k>). For this reason, it is important to draw pupils’ at-
tention to interlinguistic analogies, e.g. ‘Listen, cow in English is almost like
Kuh in German!’
Positive transfer in terms of communicative strategies can be found al-
readyin verysmallchildren.AsTracy(2008) shows,in bilingualchildren code-
mixing, i.e. the use of two languages in the same utterance, can be related

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