Innovation in Language Learning

In dedicating myself to the concept of language awareness I tried to show how important it is to focus in class on the question of how languages work. Reflecting on, analyzing and comparing different structural realizations of certain ideas in various languages is not only a method of improving linguistic competence but seems to be also an interesting and motivating task for learners.

Learners seem to prefer certain frequent grammatical structures of their L1 when producing output in an L2. This does not necessarily mean that the output is seriously grammatically incorrect, but structures might be chosen inadequately. With this contribution I want to show – concentrating on Polish speakers of German as an L2 – in how far my presumption is correct. I want to compare German texts written by native speakers on the one hand and by Polish L1 speakers on the other hand, and analyze whether Polish people use the participle construction (a construction which is quite frequent in Polish) more often than native speakers do and if so in which situations they make use of this structure. If my presumption results correct this underlines the benefit of language awareness concepts and contrastive work.