Determinants of learning success in German as a Foreign Language. Features of the first or second language?

Research on foreign language acquisition has shown that all previously learned languages influence the success in learning a new foreign language. But it is still not known which areas of language proficiency are concerned and to what extent they are involved. The present study is a contribution to answering this question, looking at the case marking of German nouns and pronouns in particular. A sample of 134 learners of German as a foreign language was involved. Each of the participants had as their mother tongue one of the languages spoken in Cameroon, with French being common to them all as their second language. The results reveal an influence of the mother tongue on case marking in both French and German. However, while the influence was confined to personal pronouns in French, it was detectable in both nouns and pronouns in German. The article discusses the theoretical and didactic implications of these findings.