Deutsch als zweite fremdsprache nach Englisch

The aim of this study is to figure out the effects of linguistic similarities that the German foreign language learners - whose first foreign language is English - come across while learning German. The study is limited to the vocabulary dimension. The participants of the study are the students, who enrolled in German Language Teacher Training Program at Faculty of Education in Anadolu University. All of the students come to the German language teacher training program through a national placement exam which was in English. The proficiency levels of the participants both in English and German were examined through standard proficiency exams (Michigan Tests and Test-DaF). Additionally, a 5 point Likert type questionnaire, which was intended to figure out the source and reason of linguistic interaction in terms of vocabulary, was developed and administered to the participants. The first part of the questionnaire inquires the demographic information and educational backgrounds of the participants. The following parts of the questionnaire divided into three parts which include word pairs. All of the word pairs that were used in this study either take place in internationally acceptable vocabularies, or that are identified through the findings of the studies of the researcher. Regarding this, 113 German-English word pairs, which look like each other in terms of their orthographic features, were given to the participants in order to examine their word knowledge. In the next section, 114 German word and their English equivalents, and in the final section, 112 English word and their German equivalents were given to the participants. The data that obtained through the questionnaire and through the proficiency exam results in both languages were computerized through SPSS 12.0 package program and they were interpreted statistically. The interpretations of the results show that the learners perceive and use the orthographically similar words as equivalent words in both languages. In terms of linguistic perspective, this finding shows that there are positive and negative transfers between the languages. Regarding this fact, the curriculum might be designed as covering those word pairs in order to make the learners conscious about them. Accordingly, it can be claimed that, the similarities between the vocabularies of languages can be used beneficially in terms of developing the learners? self confidence and arising their language awareness, instead assuming these transfers as negative attitudes while learning a foreign language