Page 55 - Diversity in Action

Transfer in Early Multilingual Acquisition

As far as the transfer of syntactic structures is concerned, it is important to
underline that in many cases we do not find instances of full transfer, but only
a delay (i.e. a quantitative difference) in the acquisition of certain phenom-
ena, as is the case of subject pronouns in Italian as ‘weaker’ L1 or L2. All bilin-
gual children growing up with German and Italian sooner or later discover
that Italian is a null-subject language and German not, but the frequency of
overt subjects tends to be higher in bilingual children than in monolingual
Italian children and adults (Müller et al., 2007, p. 171).
Finally, in bi- or plurilingual children at primary school age negative trans-
fer often occurs in spelling, especially when they are alphabetised in only one
language. Children with Italian L1 growing up in Germany who possess liter-
acy only in the L2 German often transfer the spelling rules of German (e.g. [S]
spelt as <sch> and [v] as <w>) to their first language, e.g. Il pesche die Luka
e dschallo e werde (= Il pesce di Luca è giallo e verde; Engl. ‘Luca’s fish is yellow
and green’) (Belke, 2003, p. 93).
For bilingual children with a heritage language spoken only or mainly at
home, it would be of great importance to acquire the spelling rules of both
languages, otherwise they risk to become literate only in the language of
instruction.
In general, negative transfer and other deviations from the norm should be
considered as necessary steps towards a higher language competence and
not aserrorsto becondemned.In orderto detect andavoidnegativetransfer,
it is fundamental for teachers to have knowledge of the main characteristics
of their learners’ language systems and to offer, whenever possible, modules
of integrated language teaching focusing on the similarities and differences
between the languages involved.

Key Takeaways
• Transfer is an important part of linguistic development and does not hin-
der the language acquisition process.
• Transfer cannot be explained by the contrastive hypothesis alone, i.e. posi-
tive transfer in case of L1–L2 proximity can only occur when learners are de-
velopmentally ready. Conversely, L1–L2 distance does not necessarily lead
to negative transfer.
• Lexical transfer is a fundamental communication strategy, with regard
both to the reception of cognates and to bridging lexical gaps in produc-
tion.
• It is possible to promote transfer through special strategies, such as stim-
ulus questions and repetitions, and by drawing the children’s attention to
similarities (and differences) between languages.

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