CROSSLINGUISTIC INFLUENCE OF AN L3 ON AN L2 IN THE PRODUCTIVE LANGUAGE SKILLS

Abstract

Multilingual speakers usually pass through a process of mixing the languages they are learning. For this reason, the purpose of this research was to detect the role of an L3 in the output of an L2. In order to find an answer, students who have English as L2 and were studying a third language (German and Korean) were submitted to three different speaking and writing exercises to identify crosslinguistic syntactic and phonological influences of their L3s due to typological closeness. The results were obtained by making use of an observation sheet and checklists; the data is presented on graphs and descriptive paragraphs. At the end of the research, it was shown that close languages (typologically speaking) create more conflicts in pronunciation for multilingual speakers than distant languages. The impact of this research lay in detecting how multilingual students perform a switching process in different languages and making them conscious of this phenomenon