Abstract Summary
This contribution focuses on the role of crosslinguistic awareness in the L3 transfer of tense-aspect systems in Romance languages. Crosslinguistic awareness will be shown to play a major role in enhancing the learners’ ability to deploy language-specific strategies in order to avoid negative transfer.
Abstract :
While studies on L3 transfer have looked at different language domains, oftentimes separately (e.g. vocabulary or syntax), interface phenomena remain relatively under-researched. Moreover, transfer studies have mainly considered crosslinguistic (dis)similarities per se, but very little is known about the role played by the learner’s awareness of such (dis)similarities – i.e. crosslinguistic awareness (XLA) (Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008). The present study addresses these two issues by investigating how XLA affects the occurrence or inhibition of transfer in an interface phenomenon. Namely, the researched phenomenon is tense-aspect systems in Romance languages (RLs), where the distinction between perfective and imperfective entails different levels of analysis (vocabulary, morphology and discourse-pragmatics). The participants were Swedish university learners of an additional RL who already had knowledge of a previous RL. The learners had various language constellations, regarding both what specific RLs they had knowledge of and the order in which they had acquired them (either as L1 or as L2). The learners’ knowledge of the distinction between perfective and imperfective in their different RLs was tested through a gap-filling task. The empirical data were elicited by means of an oral retelling of the frog story, performed in the learners’ different RLs. Subsequently, a retrospective interview aimed to uncover the learners’ XLA of (dis)similarities across RLs in the tense-aspect domain. Data shows that XLA is a crucial factor in the acquisition of tense-aspect systems in RLs, as it enables learners to deploy various strategies for avoiding negative transfer. Moreover, the learners’ specific language constellation plays an important role, in that XLA tends to be oriented towards those domains where discrepancies exist across RLs.
Jarvis, S., & Pavlenko, A. (2008). Crosslinguistic influence in language and cognition. New York, NY: Routledge.
