Evaluation of EuroComGerm-based learning by university students with L1 Japanese, L2 English, and L3 German

From an empirical study for Dutch intercomprehension

Abstract

I conducted an empirical study on "intercomprehension", which refers to the reading comprehension of a language that an individual has neither acquired nor formally learned. The study comprised a nine-hour experiment and subsequent interviews. In the experiment, three undergraduate students with L1 Japanese, L2 English, and L3 German attempted reading texts in Dutch, which they had not previously learned; thus, they had to read them inferentially. During a three-hour instructional session based on the didactic approach EuroComGerm as part of the experiment, the participants learned how to decode Dutch words and sentence structures by using their knowledge of English and German. This paper presents the participants' remarks on the advantages and disadvantages of the approach from the interviews.