THE WRITTEN PRODUCTION OF STUDENTS LEARNING GERMAN AS A FL: EXAMPLES OF A NEGATIVE TRANSFER FROM BOSNIAN/CROATIAN/SERBIAN

Abstract

While learning German as a second or foreign language errors are bound to occur. Some of them are result of the transfer from a dominant language system (usually the mother tongue L1). This paper analyses final papers in written language of students who are learning German as a foreign language at the University „Džemal Bijedić“ in Mostar (Faculty of Humanities) and whose mother tongue is either Bosnian, or Croatian, or Serbian. Therefore, errors that occur as a result of an overlap between Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian as a first and German as a second language will be compared.

The data consisted of 70 final papers from first year students who had approximately 120 hours of German, and 70 final papers from students who had altogether approximately 180 hours of German (approximately 60 hours in the second year).

Depending on which elements are transferred, a phonological and orthographic level, a grammatical level, a lexical-semantic level of transfer could be differentiated. As the data only consisted of written language, no phonetic errors could be recorded. Developmental errors were not analysed, but as it is not always easy to distinguish them from other types of errors, and since some examples included them, they were just briefly mentioned.

The hypothesis tested was that some transfer errors will disappear at higher levels of German knowledge, some of them will appear less frequently, while new ones will appear with more complex language knowledge. The analysis was qualitative, not quantitative: the investigation included types of errors that were classified with examples, and not the exact numbers of errors that were found.

The hypothesis was confirmed. While the beginners’ level of knowledge was characterized by various orthographic errors, second year students stopped transferring most of them. Both levels had equal variety of error types on the grammatical level. The higher level had more lexical errors then the lower level, due to a larger vocabulary and more complex semantic demands.

Although comparative analysis showed that some errors caused by linguistic transfer that occurred while learning German as an L2 were persistant, those were, like in the case of a substitution of letters representing voiced sounds for voiceless (d/t, p/b), due to the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian orthographic system.