Learner Difficulties with German Case: Implications from an Action Research Study

This article examines the problems that many beginning L2 learners encounter when dealing with the German case system. It isolates three elements that make case usage challenging: understanding the concept of case itself, identifying grammatical gender, and selecting the correct case marker from a set of overlapping forms. Data from an action research study reveal interesting correlations between learners' proficiency with case marking and their understanding of English grammatical metalanguage, their goals regarding accuracy, their reported strategies for determining case, and their self-assessment of their German skills. These results lead to implications for improving learners' accuracy in case assignment and, at the same time, raise the question of how much accuracy is appropriate at the beginning level.