Abstract
In our study, we analysed word order in “weil”-clauses in texts of young learners with various language backgrounds and exposures in the German sub-corpus of the longitudinal learner corpus LEONIDE (Glaznieks et al. 2022). We focused on two groups of non-native learners from lower secondary schools which differ with respect to the learner setting, i.e. the school’s main language of instruction and the status of German in the schools. Pupils of group (A) attend schools in which Italian is the main language of instruction and German is taught as first additional language from grade one onwards. Pupils of group (B) attend schools in which German is the main language of instruction and German lessons follow native language instruction. While both groups have to master word order differences between dependent (verb-final) and independent clauses (verb-second), we assume different preconditions for learning the target word order for (A) and (B).