Abstract:

Foreign language skills are considered as the 21st century global competency. In this regard one of the main requirements for university graduates is multilanguage proficiency, which contributes to successful professional communication, competitiveness and mobility. Therefore, the demand for multilingual university graduates is on the increase.

Although, there have been numerous studies focusing on the third language acquisition, some questions regarding issues of multilanguage interference need further investigation. In particular, there has been a great deal of confusion in the literature regarding the source language of cross-linguistic interference in the third language acquisition.

The article focuses on the factors determining the sources of negative cross-linguistic interference and positive transfer in learning English in the sphere of professional communication (ESP) as a second foreign language (FL2) by Russian-speaking university students, who study one of the European languages (German, French or the Spanish language) as their first foreign language (FL1).

The authors put forward the hypothesis that the main errors and deviations from the norms of English at lexical, grammatical and syntactic levels in learners’ speech are associated with typological differences between the language pairs, as well as with the specificity of students’ native language influence and their proficiency level in FL1 and FL2.

To test the hypothesis, a pilot study was conducted. The research methodology included testing the participants in vocabulary and terminology of ESP and further error analysis. The participants were asked to provide a written translation of the names of the international organizations from Russian into English and from their FL1 (German, French or the Spanish language) into English. The test results were compared through statistical analysis performed by using t-statistics. The participants were senior students of Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia who studied ESP as their FL2 and French, Spanish or the German language as their FL1. The results of the pilot study are presented in the paper.

The results of the study confirm that both negative interference and positive transfer are observed when Russian-speaking students learn English terminology and vocabulary in the sphere of professional communication, while the European languages which are closely related to English might be a source of positive transfer of grammar and lexical skills. Possible sources of negative cross-linguistic interference are learners’ FL1 and their native language.

The results demonstrate that the most frequent causes of interference are linguistic differences in the systems of the source and target languages. The authors conclude that learning a FL2 is a process qualitatively different from mastering FL1 due to the features of cross-linguistic interference where learners operate three language systems (a native language and two foreign languages), which should be taken into account in FL2 teaching methodology.

Keywords:

Cross-linguistic interference, lexical interference, translation, sources of interference, English for Special Purposes, third language, error analysis, second foreign language, positive transfer.