Introduction

Kari Tenfjord University of Bergen

Scott Jarvis University of Utah

Anne Golden University of Oslo

Background and Orientation

As can quickly be seen through a perusal of studies published both historically and even recently in the major journals of applied linguistics, a good deal of what we know about second language acquisition and of the learning of later languages comes from investigations where the target language is English and the learners' background languages are European. The findings of such studies should of course not be disregarded, but there is a great deal more to be discovered about language acquisition than can be gleaned from patterns produced by European learners of English – or even by English-speaking foreign-language classroom learners of French, German or Spanish, who are also over-represented in the literature. In other words, there is a genuine need for more studies on second language acquisition involving (a) learners of languages other than English and (b) learners who come from non-European backgrounds, especially in cases where (c) the learners are immigrants to the host country and thus experience the language in naturalistic contexts over an extended period of time and with the motivation that comes from a commitment to making the host country their new home. A particularly useful type of study would involve comparisons of a large number of adult immigrant learners from each of several L1 backgrounds – both European and non-European – having comparable levels of proficiency in the language of the host country.

The present book offers a number of studies that meet these criteria. The studies included in this book all draw from the ASK1 corpus – a corpus of texts written by adult immigrant learners of Norwegian at controlled levels of language proficiency. As we will describe in the paragraphs that follow, the ASK corpus includes texts written by L2 learners of Norwegian from 10 different L1 backgrounds, two of which are non-Indo-European (i.e. Somali and Vietnamese), five of which are Indo-European but non- Germanic (i.e. Albanian, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Polish, Russian and Spanish) and the remaining three of which, like Norwegian, are both Indo-European and Germanic (i.e. Dutch, English and German). The composition of these learner groups offers the possibility of a number of intriguing comparisons. Most of the studies in this book examine only a subset of these groups, but the patterns produced by the non-Indo-European groups are given special attention, and inter-L1-group comparisons are a core feature of every study.

The studies in this book deal with the acquisition and assessment of a number of disparate features of Norwegian involving vocabulary, grammatical morphology, syntactic constructions and broad categories of errors, but all of the studies in this book are linked to each other through the theme of crosslinguistic influence. Following the common convention of using the term crosslinguistic influence interchangeably with transfer (e.g. Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008; Odlin, 1989), we characterize the present volume as a book on L1 transfer in the acquisition of Norwegian as a second or additional language. However, in this book we adopt a perspective on transfer that is broader than the goals pursued in most other contemporary research on crosslinguistic influence. Whereas other studies tend to take cases of inter-L1-group heterogeneity (i.e., differences in the use of the target language by learners who speak different L1s) as merely the starting point for a larger analysis whose goal is to determine whether differences in the learners' L1s themselves are the direct cause of the inter-group differences in target-language performance (cf. Jarvis, 2000), the studies in the present volume seek first and foremost to identify cases of inter-L1-group heterogeneity and to explore their nature and distribution. Some of the studies in the present book go a step further and adopt Jarvis' (2000, 2010) methodological framework in order to confirm L1 effects beyond inter-L1-group heterogeneity. However, what characterizes the approach to transfer taken in this book is the recognition that (a) transfer effects are not always immediately traceable to the source language and (b) the unique challenges experienced by learners from different L1 backgrounds are sometimes of tremendous theoretical and practical import regardless of whether those challenges can be shown to be a direct consequence of the learners' specific L1 knowledge.

The ASK corpus is a collection of texts written in an authentic assessment situation by more than 1700 adult learners, resulting in a corpus of about 620,000 words. The texts were written as part of two separate standardized tests of Norwegian as a second language: The Language Test for Adult Immigrants (Språkprøven i norsk for voksne innvandrere) and the Test of Norwegian – Advanced Level (Test i norsk – høyere nivå). The former test was designed for learners at an intermediate level of Norwegian proficiency, whereas the latter test is used as a university entrance examination for learners at a higher, pre-academic level. Both tests contain multiple components, only one of which is the essay part that constitutes the content of the ASK corpus.

The texts written as part of the intermediate test are mainly expository essays, but they also include narratives and argumentative essays. The texts written as part of the higher-level test, on the other hand, are all argumentative essays. Comparable texts were also collected from a control group of 200 L1 Norwegians, 100 of whom were given some of the same prompts that were used on the intermediate-level test, and the other 100 of whom were given some of the same prompts as were found on the higher-level test. The texts written by L1 Norwegian speakers were produced under the same conditions as the learner texts. There was, nevertheless, one important difference between the two: For the learners, this was a high-stakes...