Exploring metalinguistic awareness in L3 phonological acquisition: the case of young instructed learners of Spanish in Germany

ABSTRACT

In the field of third language acquisition metalinguistic awareness is posited to be a fundamental component of multilingual competence and a key factor facilitating the acquisition of additional languages. Building upon Bialystok's model of attention and control, and Wrembel's research into metaphonological awareness in adult L3 learners, this study examines the role of metalinguistic awareness in the acquisition of Spanish phonology by young instructed L3 learners. The 20 multilinguals (aged 13), who were native speakers of German with upper-intermediate English as their first foreign language and intermediate Spanish as their second foreign language, were subjected to a stimulated recall protocol in German; they were asked to attend to, improve and comment on their own Spanish pronunciation in a reading task from three years ago, i.e. their initial attempts at L3 production. The findings provide evidence for different types and degrees of phonological awareness in the young L3 learners, including intuitive phonological awareness and explicit analyses of primarily Spanish consonants and word stress. Phonological crosslinguistic influence from L2 to L3 appeared to be of special concern to the learners. The findings are discussed from the perspective of both L3 speech learning and teaching.

KEYWORDS:

• Metalinguistic awareness
• phonological awareness
• L3 phonology
• young L3 learner
• multilingual acquisition
• multilingual

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Anika Gerfer for her help with data transcription and two anonymous reviewers for their most valuable comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The young multilinguals’ quotes are provided in italics and translated from German into English by the author. The coding refers to the participant number and their language repertoire.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Romana Kopečková

Romana Kopečková works as a research associate at the English Department of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster. Her main research interests include age-related differences in L2 speech learning, phonological acquisition of the third language, and multilingual pedagogies.