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 ASK 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. 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).