Composing a narrative story in a third language: multilinguals’ reliance on multiple languages in an L3 linguistic task

Abstract

This paper reports on the results of an exploratory study that employed the concurrent think-aloud method to investigate narrative text-creating strategies of multilingual Transylvanian–Hungarians in English, their third language. The study explored the participants’ reliance on their different languages as they composed a story in English based on a series of wordless pictures. The study gave special attention to the role of the participants’ language of education in the composition process. It also looked at the mental processes for creating content in their third language. Study participants were Hungarian–Romanian bilingual students at two Transylvanian schools whose language of education was Romanian at one and Hungarian at the other. Study findings appear to suggest that the languages used by multilinguals have distinct roles in the process of tackling a composition task in a third-language text. While composing the target language text, study participants used their first language mostly for task identification and self-regulation, and employed their second language, Romanian, mainly as linguistic assistance in the process of creating the target language content.