Investigating Positive Lexical Transfer from English (L2) to German (L3) by Quebec Francophones

Abstract

The present study was carried out at five college-level institutions in the province of Quebec (Canada). Think-aloud protocols (TAPs) were used to investigate positive lexical transfer from English (L2) to German (L3) by Quebec Francophones (n = 66) after five weeks of formal L3 instruction. The participants were asked to think aloud while translating unknown words in German (L3) that were presented in oral and written form into French (L1). Positive transfer was operationalized by correct translations that participants explicitly or implicitly related to an English cognate. Out of the influential factors under investigation, metalinguistic awareness was shown to be the strongest predictor of positive transfer, followed by L2 proficiency. Moreover, a fine-grained analysis of the TAPs revealed inter- and intra-individual variability in the conscious activation of related L2 vocabulary and the use of metalinguistic resources. Our observations point to the invaluable contribution of introspective data to complement findings based on language-inherent characteristics of crosslinguistic influence. They highlight individual strategies related to learner and context variables, in line with a dynamic view of multilingualism.