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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13: Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’ 29, Nijmegen
Edited by Janine Berns, Haike Jacobs and Dominique Nouveau
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13] 2018
► pp. 279–296

The role of L2 exposure in L3A

A comparative study between third and fourth year secondary school students in the Netherlands

| University of Amsterdam

In this study, we test the L2 Status Factor hypothesis (Bardel & Falk, 2007, 2012), which claims that the L2 is the preferred background language over the L1 in L3 acquisition (henceforth L3A), and we investigate the effect of L2 English exposure on the role of the L1 and the L2 in L3A. We examine how increased developmental L2 exposure changes L1/L2 influence in L3A by comparing third- to fourth-year secondary school students in the Netherlands who are enrolled in either an immersion or a traditional ‘regular’ secondary school programme. We look at verb placement where French differs from English or from Dutch, reporting data from a grammaticality judgement task.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background of this study
    • 2.1Studies on the L2 status at a morphosyntactic level
    • 2.2The role of L2 input in L3A
  • 3.This study
    • 3.1Research questions and hypotheses
      • 3.1.1Research questions
      • 3.1.2Hypotheses
    • 3.2Learning context of the participants
    • 3.3Finite verb movement in Dutch, English and French
      • 3.3.1French differs from English: V-to-T movement
      • 3.3.2French differs from Dutch: V-to-C movement
      • 3.3.3Predictions
    • 3.4Data collection
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Comparing (no) V-to-T to V-to-C
      • 4.1.1Comparing the V-to-T to the V-to-C movement construction: Y4
      • 4.1.2Comparing the V-to-T to the V-to-C movement construction: Y3
    • 4.2Comparing third to fourth year students and immersion to ‘regular’ students
      • 4.2.1Comparing Y3 to Y4
      • 4.2.2Comparing immersion vs. ‘regular’
    • 4.3Summary of the results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.13.17sta
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2018. The influence of L2 English on L3 French acquisition in bilingual education*. Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics 7:2 ► pp. 227 ff. DOI logo
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