Crosslinguistic influence from english as L2 to french as L3 in students of the B. Ed in english program of La Gran Colombia University enrolled in the third language course requisite at the language institute, Clic.

Abstract

This study explores the cross-linguistic influence in pre-service English teachers at La Gran Colombia University who were enrolled in the French course at Centro de Lenguas e Intenacionalización y Cultura, CLIC, as part of their requisite to earn their diploma as English teachers. The aim of the paper is to prove if there is cross-linguistic influence in the third language acquisition process of those students who are taking French as their third language. This paper offers a different way to approach the cross-linguistic phenomenon in two linguistic subsystems: phonetics and phonology, but from a hearer´s perspective who based on the students´ voice recordings provided relevant information to determine if there was influence and where it was coming from. Besides, it is done from a pedagogic perspective to understand the learning and teaching process for French as a third language in the new program of Modern Languages at the university, since it was developed by a pre-service teacher and a professor of the School of Education of the same university. This study demonstrated the existence of cross-linguistic influence, and based on the French native speakers, it was possible to observe that the main source of influence was coming from the students’ mother tongue, which for all of the participants was Spanish. The type of research selected for the study was quantitative due to the population, the academic area and the type of data collected throughout the process.