Who attends our foreign language courses? A preliminary look into the profile of learners of Chinese

Abstract

This article takes a look into the profile of students enrolled at elective foreign language (FL) courses at German universities. Two surveys on their study biography show that learners of Chinese have on average learned more previous foreign languages than learners of Spanish. As more experienced FL learners, they draw on more FL learning strategies and more sources for transfer, a psycholinguistic process observed in FL learning. Based on contrastive theories, possible sources for transfer into and out of Chinese are suggested to contribute to the successful teaching of Chinese.