Project leaders: Prof. Dr. Christoph Gabriel (Universität Hamburg), Prof. Dr. Adelheid Hu (Université du Luxembourg)
Research assistants: Jeanette Thulke, Lan Diao

As a result of migration and globalization, linguistic and cultural diversity have become central prerequisites for foreign language learning and teaching in educational settings. This project explicitly combines linguistic and language-pedagogical perspectives and examines the acquisition of Romance languages in a German school context by multilingual learners with Mandarin Chinese as a first language (L1). Previous work conducted within the context of the Hamburg Cluster of Excellence LiMA has focused on the acquisition of French prosody, thereby comparing recordings from multilingual learners with data collected from monolingual controls (L1 German). In addition to the French L3 data (target language), data were collected from the respective first language(s) German and/or Mandarin as well as from the previously learnt foreign language English (L2). Furthermore, all subjects were interviewed with respect to their individual learning strategies as well as multilingual and phonological awareness.

The analyses performed on the speech data and the interviews showed that multilingual learners with a high degree of multilingual and phonological awareness performed better in terms of the target-like production of French prosody than the monolingual controls. This indicates that positive transfer from the background languages to L3 French can be enhanced by extra-linguistic factors such as those mentioned above.

Förderung im Rahmen der Landesexzellenz der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg