Appraisal of errors and infelicities produced by Dutch learners of German

Responses to questionnaire in German by by German professionals [Germany; Spring 2016; qualtrics survey]
Abstract
One of the new scales in the CEFR Companion Volume (2018) is online interaction. The new descriptors cover goal-oriented online transactions, including written correspondence and the use of formulaic language. Dutch learners of German in business schools learn German for special purposes at B1/2-level: they are requested to master German well enough in a professional context, in order to facilitate interactions and transactions. The question is how their not always flawless attempts at inviting a member to a meeting is received by L1 language users. Is the level of B1/2 German sufficient to avoid bothersome situations? Is the mastering at B1/2-level enough to maintain a good relationship with a German partner? In order to find out whether communicative clashes might occur because of lack of appropriate language, 98 German business professionals, all L1 speakers of German, were asked to rate on a 7-point Likert scale pragma-linguistic infelicities and syntactic, lexical and morphological errors in 16 business e-mails written by Dutch learners of German. The results showed that pragma-linguistic infelicities were considered more bothersome than syntactic, lexical or morphological errors, which suggests L2 German writing courses should raise more explicit awareness of the pragma-linguistic force in intercultural communication, in line with suggestions of the new companion. Furthermore, it was studied whether knowledge of the writer’s foreign provenance and Dutch nationality affected the judgement of the German professionals. This was not the case.
Keywords:
Second language acquisition, error, pragma-linguistic infelicity, German, written interaction

Data are used for contribution to Language Awareness, to be published in 2022; title: The Importance of Raising Teachers’ and Students’ Awareness of Pragmatics
in German Second Language Writing: A Study of the Effect of Grammatical and Lexical Errors Compared to pragma-linguistic Infelicities
Authors: Antoinette Luijkx, Marinel Gerritsen & Margot van Mulken