Third Language Acquisition Research Methods
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THIRD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION RESEARCH METHODS
INTRODUCTION
Research methods in third language (L3) acquisition are used to address questions about acquisition processes and products, their educational and social contexts, as well as the individual variables involved. The field only started in the late 1980s. Consequently, the methodology is innovative and highly eclectic, with designs borrowed both from linguistics and psychology by way of second language acquisition (SLA) research. Surprisingly for a young field, quantitative, hypothesis-testing studies outnumber qualitative, question-generating designs. Not uncommon are mixed designs combining description and interpretation with descriptive and even inferential statistics. Data are collected both longitudinally and cross-sectionally, often from large samples in tutored contexts, only occasionally following experimental intervention and most often elicited by means of questionnaires, tests, and interviews. The most popular quantitative procedures include analyses of variance (ANOVA), correlations, and regressions. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
In an age of migration and supranational entities it has become widely recognized that multilingualism is the norm rather than the exception. Changes in general attitudes toward minorities have led to greater recognition of language rights and needs of minority populations, sometimes resulting in the development of educational policies that address such rights. Increased communication between European and American researchers is also responsible for the growing interest in trilingualism and L3 acquisition. In the context of these shifts, a new focus on the relationship between bilingualism and cognition led to laboratory research investigating the role of prior experience on the acquisition of an L3 (McLaughlin and Nayak, 1989; Nation and McLaughlin, 1986; Nayak, Hansen, Krueger, and McLaughlin, 1990). Multilingual subjects (i) were found to habitually exert more effort when processing verbal stimuli; (ii) were better able to shift strategies to restructure their language systems; and (iii) used cognitive processing strategies that facilitated the construction of formal K. A. King and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 10: Research Methods in Language and Education, 113–135. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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rules. The designs of these studies are characteristic of the cognitive framework to which they belong. For example, they are experimental and compare the effects of highly controlled, computer-generated treatments on the acquisition of an artificial grammar. Conclusions are based on results from ANOVAs and post-hocs on accuracy and latency data. From a Chomskyan approach, but also process-oriented in nature, Klein’s investigation (1995) of the acquisition of the prepositionstranding parameter by ESL learners shows that multilinguals and monolinguals produce the same type of errors but multilinguals learn
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