In this poster, we present the preliminary results of a study on the acquisition of Dutch compound constructions by French-speaking learners in Belgium. Additionally, we compare learners enrolled in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programs with learners following traditional second language instruction. Languages are known to vary significantly with respect to their preferences for analytic or synthetic constructions (Schlücker 2019). For instance, Germanic languages tend to use compounds more frequently than Romance languages (Van Goethem 2009; Booij 2010; Schlücker 2019). Van Goethem (2009), for instance, has demonstrated that Dutch has a stronger tendency towards [A+ N] compounding than French (e.g. Du. hoogspanning vs Fr. haute tension ‘high voltage’). Based on the cross-linguistic similarities and differences between the preference for compound or phrasal constructions in Dutch and French and on the beneficial effect of CLIL on SLA, as already demonstrated in the case of intensifying constructions (Hendrikx 2019), we assume that the CLIL learners’ L2 use of Dutch will integrate more features typical of L1 Dutch use of compounds. We will take into consideration the formal make-up of the compounds, their semantic classification, their frequency and productivity, and possible mistakes in the learner data (for instance, non-target-like phrasal constructions). The data for this study come from a corpus of written productions in the form of fictional e-mails, collected within the context of a research project on CLIL in French-speaking Belgium (cf. Hiligsmann et al. 2017). The data were collected from 196 sixth-year (twelfth grade) French-speaking learners of Dutch from six different secondary schools in Wallonia. Moreover, we collected data from a control group of 63 native speakers of Dutch of about the same age. The corpus data and background variables are integrated in the MulTINCo database (Meunier et al. 2020). From the theoretical point of view, the study takes a Diasystematic ...