This article reports two intervention studies testing the effects of plurilingual teaching on grammatical development among primary-school students learning English as a foreign language (FL). In a pre–posttest control-group design, more than 200 9–10-year old majority language German and minority language students received plurilingual FL teaching (intervention group) or regular FL-only teaching (control group). Study 1 on the acquisition of wh-questions showed that systematic cross-linguistic comparisons of the FL with the majority language and minority languages facilitate acquisition of object questions. In Study 2 on passives, the intervention and the control groups both demonstrated comparable gains. We suggest that plurilingual teaching has advantages when the majority language differs from the target language (Study 1) yet not when a phenomenon is comparable across languages (Study 2). In neither study did learners show generalization to related grammatical phenomena. Finally, majority language and minority language students did not perform differently, which suggests that plurilingual FL teaching is suitable for all FL learners. These findings demonstrate that plurilingual FL teaching facilitates grammatical development by increasing learners’ awareness of cross-linguistic similarities and differences.

中文翻译：

---

多语教学对早期外语学习语法发展的影响

本文报告了两项干预研究，测试多语教学对英语作为外语 (FL) 学习的小学生语法发展的影响。在前测控制组设计中，超过 200 名 9-10 岁的多语德语和少语学生接受了多语外语教学（干预组）或常规外语教学（控制组）。wh的获取研究一-问题表明，FL 与多数语言和少数语言的系统跨语言比较有助于获取对象问题。在关于被动的研究 2 中，干预组和对照组都表现出相当的收益。我们认为，当大多数语言与目标语言不同时（研究 1），多语教学具有优势，但当现象在不同语言之间具有可比性（研究 2）时则不然。在这两项研究中，学习者都没有表现出对相关语法现象的概括。最后，多数语言和少数语言学生的表现没有差异，这表明多语外语教学适合所有外语学习者。