Do L2 speakers think in the L1 when speaking in the L2?

Abstract

The article presents the results of an elicitation study, including linguistic, eyetracking and memory data, with 22 advanced Czech and 22 advanced Russian L2 speakers of German, as well as 22 native speakers of German producing verbalizations of a set of short video clips. It investigates the role of grammatical forms in the construal of goal-oriented motion events. All three measures--verbalization, allocation of attention, and memory--point in the same direction: although advanced L2 speakers are successful in learning the necessary forms and their appropriate functions, they seem not to succeed in mapping these forms onto the principles required for the construal of events in the target language. This suggests that even for highly proficient L2 speakers, conceptual restructuring into the direction of the L2 is limited.