Abstract:

Despite a small amount of research on third language acquisition, it has been proved that sometimes learners transfer some of their previous language knowledge, not only from their L1, but also form their L2, when learning a third language.

In the following article, the authors attempted to pursuit the following aims:
Firstly, to understand what aspects of the English language may prove useful for teachers of Italian as a third language to Russian native-speakers, in the context of Kazan Federal University, Russian Federation. Secondly, to describe in what way these aspects could be used productively in class to help students when learning their third language worldwide.

In Kazan Federal University Italian is taught as a second foreign language after English to students specializing in philology, translation, and interpreting. Students speak Russian as their native language and have at least pre-intermediate level of English.
In the first part of the article the authors showed the results of a survey conducted on a group of students of Kazan Federal University to understand how they perceive the typological distance between their native language and their second (English) and third (Italian) language.

In the second part, the authors provided some recommendations on the way English could be used in class to help students in the learning of Italian as their third language. They focused on those aspects of grammar and vocabulary where English proved to be perceived closer to Italian according to the survey.

The research data collected by using traditional methods of observation, contrastive analysis, questionnaire, induction and deduction allowed the authors to outline the aspects of the English language that may trigger or constrain language transfer when teaching Italian as a second foreign language. For example, the Russian language doesn’t have such part of speech as an article, however the English does. Thus, there is no need to pay special attention to the functions of an article in the Italian and a teacher may focus solely on its specific functions. Here English may become a useful device for facilitating the process of learning Italian.

The authors come to the conclusion that language transfer indeed a powerful language learning strategy. Among the teacher’s roles, the authors cater for helping students to make advantage of previous language knowledge to improve the learning of a new foreign language.

Keywords:

Italian as a foreign language, language transfer, educational technology, Russia, language education, university education.