Page 54 - Diversity in Action

Marco Magnani, Federica Ricci Garotti, and Katharina Salzmann

the word the young learner lacked. In general, at pre-primary level implicit
teaching should be favoured over explicit language instruction, which can
gradually be introduced at primary school level.
The following example (11), in which a three-year-old child (CH) with Italian
L1 and German L2 is looking at a picturebook about wolves, contains several
instances of lexical and syntactic transfer. After imitating the wolf’s howling,
the girl asks in Italian why the wolf makes this noise and the adult (A) answers
in German that this is because he is calling the other wolves. The child then
asks in German why he does so, using the conjunction weil instead of the in-
terrogative pronoun warum, probably because she transfers the semantics
of the Italian perché, which both means ‘why’ and ‘because,’ to the German
weil, which however cannot introduce a question. Moreover, she omits the
obligatory subject pronoun in German (er), most probably due to the fact
that Italian in this case does not foresee the pronoun. Nevertheless, it has to
be underlined that the child, after starting the conversation in Italian, makes
a huge effort to switch to the L2 German producing an utterance which, from
the communicative point of view, is perfectly understandable. What is more,
the utterance contains characteristics which could be considered typical of
monolingual German children at that age as well, for instance the mixing of
different conjunctions and the overgeneralisation of the plural form Wolfe
instead of Wölfe, in which the ending -e for plural (e.g. Tisch-Tische)is erro-
neously applied to the noun Wolf. For this reason, not all utterances deviating
from the norm should automatically be considered as instances of transfer,
as they could also be natural acquisition steps, identical or at least similar to
thefirst languageacquisition process,especiallyin earlysecondlanguageac-
quisition (Tracy, 2008, p. 154). Finally, we should also have a look at the adult’s
utterances. While the child at first replies in Italian, the adult sticks to German
and thus provides important linguistic input which the girl could re-use in
her utterances (e.g. the verb rufen, the overt subject pronoun er).

(11) CH: Lupo. (Wolf. [in Italian])
A: Was macht der Wolf? (What does the wolf do?)
CH: uuuuh
Perché fa così il lupo? (Why does the wolf do so? [in Italian])
Perchéfaquestiversi? (Why does he make these noises? [in Italian])
A: Weil er ruft. (Because he calls.)
Er ruft die anderen Wölfe. (He calls the other wolves.)
CH: Weil ruft anderen Wolfe? (Why does he call the other wolves?)
A: Weil er sie sucht. (Because he is looking for them.)

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