Effects of Plurilingual Teaching on Grammatical Development in Early Foreign‐Language Learning

Abstract

ion and learning transfer across constructions via inferencing. In RQ3, we asked whether effects of PTL differed between majority language and minority language students. In neither study did the two groups significantly differ in their performance at either test or between pretest and posttest. These broad parallels in effects of PTL on the two groups could have various reasons. First, parallel development across groups could be due to influence from the majority language German, which was the dominant language for all students. Previous studies in comparable populations of minority language learners have reported that students exhibit grammatical transfer from the dominant language and do not differ from their majority language peers (e.g., Hopp, 2019; Lorenz et al., 2019). In this respect, the inclusion of minority languages may not directly affect grammatical learning differentially among majority and minority language students. Second, many minority language students may not possess sufficient knowledge in their minority languages, in particular for more complex grammatical phenomena, for them to draw on constructionspecific linguistic knowledge. Alternatively, their underlying proficiency in the minority language could be too low for facilitative effects to occur more generally (e.g., Cummins, 2017). In fact, anecdotal evidence from the implementation suggests that not all minority language students could supply or verify examples of question or passive formation in their minority languages. Hence, among young minority language speakers who are strongly dominant in the majority language, the direct usefulness of PTL with reference to the majority languages may be restricted to basic differences in, for example, word order. Such differences, however, typically do not present major acquisitional challenges in (early) FL learning—at least in English. Clearly, further research on the scope and the mechanisms of cross-linguistic effects from the minority language is necessary in this population. In any case, the findings suggest that PTL can have additive effects for both minority language and majority language students in mixed primary classrooms. In sum, the two studies reported here show that plurilingual FL teaching can selectively facilitate grammatical development among primary school students. Despite the reduction in time on target language use, PTL does not seem to entail any learning disadvantages compared to regular FLonly teaching for any learner group. At the same time, our conclusions are constrained by several limitations. First, we did not test productive knowledge of the phenomena or carry out a delayed posttest, so we could not assess how learning gains would generalize across modalities or time. In addition, the findings are specific to the context and the instructional treatments of this particular study. It is an open question whether positive effects of PTL only surface if, as in this study, the grammatical interventions are embedded in the context of plurilingual teaching over longer periods of time, or whether they also arise if PTL is employed as a targeted teaching method for particular phenomena. In addition, grammatical phenomena are typically not the focus of FL instruction in primary school—for example, passive voice will regularly only be introduced in secondary schooling. It thus remains to be seen to what extent our findings generalize across teaching methods, topics, and domains. Although the majority of students in our studies reported that they enjoyed the plurilingual elements in teaching (Sturm et al., 2021), our observations from the teaching intervention suggest that young FL learners need time, guidance, and habituation to plurilingual teaching for contrastive language activities to proceed smoothly in the classroom (Hopp et al., 2020). Yet, insofar as the instructional treatments and implementations of PTL in this study represent typical approaches and contexts of plurilingual FL teaching in instructed contexts, the findings show that plurilingual FL teaching can lead to selective advantages over target-language-only instruction in the learning of grammatical contrasts between the FL and the majority language (Study 1). Even when language contrasts are not at issue (Study 2), the lower time on task in the FL inherent to plurilingual teaching did not lead to less learning compared to regular FL-only teaching. Finally, plurilingual teaching benefits all students in mixed classrooms in that both majority language and minority language learners demonstrate selective advantages from across-language comparisons. In conjunction with studies on word-level development, the present findings underscore that PTL is a viable strategy in FL teaching to promote the development of FL skills across language domains and across learner groups. Studies on the efficacy of PTL constitute an important step in validating plurilingual approaches to FL teaching as instructional approaches with a view to meeting the curricular goals in terms of FL proficiency. Beyond fostering advantages in the development of FL skills, plurilingual teaching may have attendant benefits in raising intercultural understanding and learner motivation as well as in engendering awareness and 18 The Modern Language Journal 0 (2021) appreciation of diversity and may thus constitute a key component of an inclusive classroom.