This presentation reports on an interventional study that investigated (1) in how far German and Dutch students can profit from instruction in decoding strategies involving receptive multilingualism when decoding the previously unknown neighbor language and (2) in how far these skills are transferrable to a typologically unrelated language (i.e. Maltese).
Receptive multilingualism is a successful means of communication when native speakers of German and Dutch interact (Beerkens, 2010; van Mulken & Hendriks, 2015). This has been related to the high degrees of typological similarities and concomitant high degrees of mutual intelligibility between these two specific neighbor languages. Recent research on multilingual education has pointed out that making use of receptive multilingualism in the classroom by explicitly pointing out typological similarities of neighbor languages, e.g. through exercises that involve contrastive comparison, can enhance language learners’ general metalinguistic awareness and, thus, foster the transfer of (meta-)linguistic knowledge across languages (Duarte & Günther van der Meij, 2018). In this presentation we will present results from two interventional studies that investigated the development of strategies involving receptive multilingualism in two comparable groups of students from Germany and the Netherlands. In a workshop that lasted one week, we introduced a group of German/Dutch students without prior knowledge of the respective other language to strategies involving receptive multilingualism through decoding oral and written examples from this other language. The workshop focused both on language-specific and language-general knowledge and strategies that can help to decode a prior unknown language, in particular, a closely related language such as the neighbor language. By means of questionnaires and two small decoding exercises that were administered prior and post the intervention, we investigated (1) the development of students’ attitudes towards the neighbor language and (2) the development of skills when decoding (a) the neighbor language and (b) a typologically unrelated language, i.e. Maltese. Preliminary results indicate that, despite the fact that students’ attitudes towards the neighbor language and towards language learning in general are not significantly impacted by the workshop, their decoding skills in the neighbor language increase and these are, to some extent, also transferred to the typologically unrelated language.
