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Part of
Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact: Essays in honour of Ans van Kemenade
Edited by Bettelou Los and Pieter de Haan
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 243] 2017
► pp. 353–370

Chapter 16
Common framework, local context, local anchors

How information-structural transfer can help to distinguish within CEFR C2

| Radboud University Nijmegen
| University of Amsterdam

The differentiation between and within CEFR C1 and C2 is commonly determined by learners’ educational and cognitive development. Linguistic development  may, however,  also continue to play a subtle role in the shape of L1 information-structural transfer. Our Dutch EFL learner corpus was expected to reveal traces of V2 to SVO information-structural transfer through a higher frequency of pre-subject adverbials functioning as “local anchors”, in comparison with a native-speaker reference corpus. This is confirmed by our statistical analysis. After aligning our data with the CEFR through an Oxford Online Placement Test, we found students’ OOPT scores to be inversely correlated with their use of local anchors. Information-structural transfer is therefore a possible indicator of language development at higher levels of L2 acquisition.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment (CEFR)
    • 1.2The CEFR in the Dutch educational system
    • 1.3L1 Transfer at higher levels of acquisition
  • 2.Materials and method
    • 2.1Corpus design
    • 2.2Procedure
    • 2.3Classification of adverbials
    • 2.4Normalisation
    • 2.5Statistical analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Native speakers and Dutch students of English compared
    • 3.2OOPT as a predictor of adverbial use
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.243.16vuu
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van Hilten, Myrte & Sanne van Vuuren
2017. Does it ‘feel’ non-native?. Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics 6:2 ► pp. 197 ff. DOI logo
van Vuuren, Sanne & Lyuben Laskin
2017. Dutch learner English in close-up. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 3:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

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