This article examines, how two Russian-speaking children (ages 9 and 11) learn Finnish morpho-syntactic structures in interaction in a transitional classroom at primary school. It also discusses whether the influence of the mother tongue is observable in the learning process. The study focuses on the development of prototypical possessive structure and standard negation. The data consist of 15 lessons, video-recorded during one school year. The episodes, including the structures used by the children, are analysed by drawing on the principles of conversation analysis. The analyses show that for both children the possessive structure appears to be more complex to learn than the standard negation. However, the children’s acquisition of these structures follows different paths. At the end of the semester, the younger child’s possessive has not become established in Finnish, whereas the older child has begun to use it in accordance with the target language norms. The negation, however, follows the target language norms, in both children’s speech.
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