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Cross‐Cultural Comparison of Second Language Learning: The Development of Comprehension of English Structures by Japanese and German Children *
Author(s) -
Morsbach Gisela
Publication year - 1981
Publication title -
tesol quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.737
H-Index - 91
eISSN - 1545-7249
pISSN - 0039-8322
DOI - 10.2307/3586409
Subject(s) - german , linguistics , psychology , comprehension , language acquisition , language development , cross cultural , language assessment , sociology , anthropology , philosophy
Sixty Japanese and thirty‐one Gerrnan‐speaking pupils were tested on the Sentence Comprehension Test investigating the understanding of various English grammatical structures. The similarity between the two groups regarding the mastery of these structures was expressed in a rank correlation coefficient (0.84, p< .01). The correlation between the performance of 5‐year‐old English monolingual children on the one hand and the Japanese and German‐speaking children on the other was 0.01 (p<.01) and (p< .01), respectively. It was concluded that the learning of English as a second language in a natural milieu seems to pass through stages similar to those exhibited by monolingual English children.