On the verbal organization of L2 tense marking in an elicited translation task by Spanish immigrants in Germany

Abstract

This article describes the undirected learning (learning without explicit teaching) of tense markers in German by Spanish migrant workers. It will be shown that the remarkable differences the informants displayed in expressing the concept of tense are a function of the daily communicative routines which they developed in order to meet their communicative needs and demands. By examining very simplified learner varieties, I will demonstrate that a traditional grammatical analysis of tense is not capable of accounting for the wide range of expressions for temporal relations which were produced in an elicited Spanish-German translation task.