Kontrastive Linguistik und Sprachdidaktik: wie lässt sich positiver Transfer fördern und negativer Transfer unterbinden?

Contrastive explanations can be useful for foreign language learners both to support a positive influence of the mother tongue and to prevent a negative influence but should always depend on the nature of the subsystems of languages to be compared. For the language pair German/Italian, four case studies are briefly pointed out: principles of gender assignment, morphological structure of concessive subjunctions, temporal semantic of future tenses, functions of passive constructions. On the basis of the different degree of overlapping between the grammatical subsystems in the two languages (maximal for concessive subjunctions, minimal for passive functions), it is shown how explanations of similarities and differences can be useful for learners of different levels.