Cross-linguistic influence in third language acquisition. The case of portuguese as a third language in Serbian students

Abstract

The main aim of this paper is to determine the cross-linguistic influence of the languages university students already speak or are learning on Portuguese as a third language. The study was conducted on 37 Serbian students who attended the first year of a Portuguese course at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Belgrade during the 2010–2011 academic year. Since we do not intend to go into a terminological discussion in this context, the cover-term “cross-linguistic influence” will be used to signal the cases where the influence of a language acquired previously is visible in the target language. Apreviously prepared dictation served as the written material analysed in this study. Although it was our belief that a written task accomplished in these circumstances would be less prone to cross-linguistic influences, besides omission of words and spelling errors, we found deviations from the target language influenced mainly by languages typologically closer to Portuguese (Spanish, Italian and French). Spanish deserves special attention since it undoubtedly exerts the most influence. Indeed, it is important to highlight that Spanish is afforded a special status among the Serbian students. Our findings reveal that the influence of Spanish is not only present in the first year of learning Portuguese as a third language in this plurilingual student population, but also that such an influence is stronger on content words than on function words. A critical analysis of the influences observed leads us to recommend, in line with Gabrys-Barker (2007, p. 44), that the teaching of foreign languages should be accomplished in a more traditional manner in the initial stages (which is in effect our case), so as to prepare students to use the necessary grammatical rules more correctly.