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Article published In:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2016
Edited by Jenny Audring and Sander Lestrade
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 33] 2016
► pp. 152–165

The influence of L2 English and immersion education on L3 French in the Netherlands

| University of Amsterdam
| University of Amsterdam
| University of Amsterdam

In this paper, we test the L2 Status Factor (Bardel & Falk, 2007) by examining to what extent Dutch secondary school students (13–15 years) prefer L2 English over L1 Dutch in L3 French acquisition, and we study the influence of L2 education by comparing an English immersion curriculum vs. a regular Dutch curriculum. We investigate verb placement in declarative root clauses, viz. V-to-T movement, where the finite verb moves to T in French but not in English and V-to-C movement, in which the V2-rule applies in Dutch but not in French. We report data from a Grammaticality Judgement Task. The results indicate that in the immersion group there is significantly more influence from English than from Dutch. In the regular group, the L1 and the L2 are both important sources of transfer.

Keywords: L3 acquisition, transfer, L2 Status Factor, syntax, verb placement, L1 Dutch, L2 English, L3 French, intermediate learners, immersion
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Transfer and current L3A research
    • 2.1The L2 Status Factor at a morphosyntactic level
    • 2.2The role of L2 education in L3 acquisition
  • 3.This study
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Finite verb movement in Dutch, English and French
      • 3.2.1French differs from English: V-to-T movement
      • 3.2.2French differs from Dutch: V-to-C movement
      • 3.2.3Predictions
    • 3.3Method
      • 3.3.1The GJT
      • 3.3.2The L2 English task
  • 4.The results
    • 4.1Comparing V-to-T to V-to-C movement
    • 4.2Comparing immersion and regular students
    • 4.3Summary of the results
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1L2 English in L3-acquisition
    • 5.2L2 education in L3 acquisition
    • 5.3Our results and other L3 theories
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 21 December 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.33.11sta
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