Volume: 4  Number: 1  Page: 52–75  doi:10.2167/ijm056.0

Acquiring Multilingualism at School. What Translation Tasks Tell Us about Adolescents' Use of the Multilingual Lexicon

Lies Sercu Faculty of Arts, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U. Leuven), Blijde-Inkomststraat 21, 3000 Leuven, Belgium

In this article, we report on an investigation that aimed to describe adolescent multilinguals' use of the different languages they were learning at school when performing a translation task. We wanted to find out whether written translations of a mother tongue text into the learner's different foreign languages would reflect a multilingual rather than a bilingual mode of language processing and production. We found that the extent of cross-linguistic influence was limited, and that our respondents, in most cases, managed to activate the appropriate target language only. When cross-linguistic influence occurred, it showed evidence of the activation of mainly two, and sometimes three, languages. Our findings also show that the extent of cross-linguistic influence is related to proficiency, psychotypology, the specific language combination (e.g. Dutch-French-English-German) and frequency of use, and that learners use different strategies to make up for lexical gaps in their knowledge.

Keywords: cross-linguistic influence, multilingual lexicon, translation task

© 2007 L. Sercu

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