Cross-linguistic awareness of adult L3 learners of English: a focus on metalinguistic reflections and proficiency

ABSTRACT

This study is concerned with finding out how L3 (third language) learners recognize and make conscious use of cross-linguistic similarities and differences and whether their metalinguistic reflections are in correlation with their proficiency. Written text productions of thirteen L3 learners of English, aged 20–25, at different L3 levels (A2, B1, B2 and C1) with various L1s and a constant variable of L2 German acquired before their L3 were used as prompts for subsequent individual reflection sessions. The retrospective data gave insights into L3 learners’ thought processes contributing significantly to the limited number of studies. The results showed that: (a) metalinguistic knowledge about one language did not result in reported activation of that language, (b) self-repair was not correlated with proficiency, (c) there is a link between explicit deficit statements, intuitive statements, over-monitoring, metasyntactic and metaphonological awareness, and their occurrence at B2 level. Finally, the metalinguistic reflection ability was demonstrated to involve an interaction of metalinguistic awareness, cross-linguistic awareness, metalinguistic knowledge, self-repair, detection of violations and analysis of linguistic features.

KEYWORDS:

• Metalinguistic knowledge
• metalinguistic reflections
• proficiency
• stimulated recall protocols
• third language acquisition
• writing

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. I would also like to thank the students from the University Language Centre (SpraZ, LMU Munich) for their time, patience and willingness to participate in this study. Likewise, I would like to express my gratitude to the director of SpraZ and the language coaches for their assistance with the data collection for the whole project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Transfer and CLI are used interchangeably in this chapter although the author is aware of the existing distinction, i.e. transfer (Gass & Selinker, 1983), as opposed to cross-linguistic influence which takes a broader perspective of the phenomenon in question (Sharwood Smith & Kellerman, 1986) referring to the performance level. The second term is followed in this paper.

2. A prerequisite to being admitted as a student is to have reached German at an advanced level, i.e. C1 which is proved through official certificates and test results.

3. In the transcripts capital letters for certain sentence elements are used to refer to stressed words. For all other sentence elements, lower case letters are used.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by internal funding from the LMU Language Centre and partially supported by a research grant from the Bavarian Research Alliance (Project ‘Multilingualism and Migration: Predicting Outcomes in Third Language Acquisition’ [grant number BayIntAn_LMU_2015_30]).

Notes on contributors

Tanja Angelovska

Tanja Angelovska is an assistant professor of English Linguistics and Instructed SLA at the University of Salzburg. Prior to this position she has taught at the University of Munich (LMU). At the University of Greenwich (UK) she accomplished her post-doc project on ‘Processing Instruction and the Age Factor’ for which she received the Leverhulme Trust International Post-Doc Fellowship. Her research interests are various instruction-based phenomena in second and third language acquisition of English. Her work is published in several books, edited volumes and in journals such as International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (IRAL). Recent books include: Second Language Acquisition: A Theoretical Introduction to Real World Applications (2016, co-authored with Alessandro Benati, Bloomsbury) and L3 Syntactic Transfer: Models, New Developments, and Implications (2017, co-edited with Angela Hahn, John Benjamins) and an edited Special Issue for Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching (2017).