Auxiliary Selection in the Present Perfect by L2 Students of German

I still don't get it: Easy versus difficult grammar in intermediate German

“…In the authors’ curriculum, perfect tense in the active and passive is prominent in over two‐thirds of the texts. It might be productive to expend more effort teaching students about transitivity (Arnett & Martin, 2004; Shannon, 1995) since transitivity explains the haben/sein distinction and makes clear the inverse relationship between active and passive. These two studies show that constructions such as Ich habe meinen Bruder nach Hause gefahren are not exceptions but helpful clarifications: the utterance describes a transitive event with two participants where the second participant is affected by the action.…”

“…Replicating the findings of Arnett and Martin (2004), students largely grasped the haben versus sein distinction. Students said they used haben as the default and sein for changes of position or state; the notion of transitivity did not factor in their decisions.…”

“…Many previous studies have provided useful information on the ease or difficulty of specific grammar structures. To name but a handful, Arnett and Martin (2004) found that intermediate students generally select the correct auxiliary verb when forming the perfect; Liamkina (2008) found that formally accurate and semantically and discursively appropriate use of the case system is difficult even for advanced learners; Walter and MacWhinney (2015) found that explicit rule‐driven instruction could help adult L2 learners use morphological cues to determine grammatical gender; Fagan (2019) proposed teaching learners to consider syllable stress and phonetic features when learning the superlative; and De Knop (2020) had success using embodiment to teach verbs with fixed prepositions.…”