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This volume brings together six case studies of an adult multilingual speaker who acquires a new language through social interaction. The book deals especially with the multilingual situation, the learner’s acquisitional activities, and the involvement of background languages in the process of speaking. It offers a coherent study of various linguistic phenomena in one individual, including patterns and functions of language switching, word search in interaction, hypothetical construction of words, and articulatory settings in speaking. The main languages involved are English (L1), German (L2) and Swedish (L3). The activation of these languages in the learner’s speech is examined in a cognitive perspective in relation to current models of the speaking process. A longitudinal corpus of NNS–NS conversations covering 21 months from the beginner stage provides the main data for these studies._x000B_Key Features:_x000B_*Presents an example of an active and purposeful language acquirer_x000B_*Explores cross-linguistic influence in a multilingual setting_x000B_*Highlights the significance of prior L2 knowledge in L3 performance_x000B_*Useful for students and researchers interested in second and third language acquisition, individual multilingualism and the human speaking process._x000B_

INTRODUCTIONThe research in recent years on language acquisition by multilinguals has clearly shown that not only the first language, but also languages acquired after the first tend to become activated when the learner attempts to learn an additional language. Studies reported so far with different combinations of languages and different types of learners display a variation as to the extent and ways in which learners draw on previously acquired languages – L1 and L2 – when performing in a new language. These prior languages will here be subsumed under the term background languages. A great deal of the discussion has come to concern the various factors which condition the activation of different background languages, and the question which languages are apt to get involved in the use of the current target language. (For an overview of these issues, see for example the contributions in Cenoz, Hufeisen and Jessner 2001.)In the earlier study reported in Chapter 2 above, the roles which the respective background languages play in the acquisition and use of a third language were investigated. That case study was carried out by Sarah Williams (SW) and the present writer (BH) and was based on longitudinal data from SW's spoken performance as an adult L3 learner. Among other things, it showed a clear division between the roles of the first and the second language, which could be related to SW's linguistic background and the acquisitional setting.

INTRODUCTIONFor language learners, spoken interaction with target language speakers not only has the function of achieving communication, but also has an acquisitional role in providing opportunities for the learners to expand their interlanguage, chances which different learners will exploit to varying degrees. Formulation attempts furnish occasions for a learner to search, establish, practise and consolidate new expressions, either in spontaneous use in passing or in active cooperation with the interlocutor. Especially the latter case, where the learner appeals to the target language speaker, offers the researcher a possibility to study the acquisitional attempts in detail. Our focus here will be on lexical items. The purpose of the article is to describe and discuss the attempts by one particularly active learner to elicit and try out new vocabulary in conversations with a native speaker.The study of lexical acquisition processes in language production of course has parallels on the comprehension side. Thus learners' vocabulary expansion by reading has been studied extensively (for a review of this research, see de Bot, Paribakht and Wesche 1997). Haastrup's (1985, 1987, 1990, 1991) detailed studies of the process of lexical inferencing provide a close-up view on how learners try to find out the meaning of encountered unfamiliar words, focusing especially on how the learners reason about the words and what knowledge they bring to bear on the task.The (largely) complementary relationship between lexical inferencing and lexical search during formulation can be expressed in the terms of Levelt's (1989, 1993) speech production model. In this framework the entries in the mental lexicon are viewed as the association between a lemma part, containing the word’s semantic and syntactic information, and a form or lexeme part which gives the corresponding phonological shape, or set of shapes. Thus whereas (for a language learner) lexical inferencing is a matter of establishing a lemma for a given lexical form, lexical search starts with an intended (tentative) notion for which a lemma is expected to exist in the target language, and the task is to arrive at an appropriate lexeme.

This paper reports on a study on the effects of reading-writing integrated tasks on vocabulary learning and explored the differential roles of creative construction and non-creative construction in promoting lexical learning. Participants were 90 first-year English majors, randomly assigned to two experimental groups (continuation and retelling) and one control group, with 30 students in each group. Results showed that the continuation group generated a substantial amount of creative construction and produced significantly more instances of creative imitation than the retelling group. The continuation group outperformed the retelling group for both receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge gain and retention, but differences were only significant in terms of productive vocabulary retention. Finally, productive vocabulary knowledge retention among the continuation group was significantly and positively correlated with creative imitation (meaning creation coupled with language imitation), but not with linguistic alignment per se. As productive vocabulary knowledge constitutes the learner ’ s ability to use lexical knowledge to express ideas in dynamic contexts, the findings afforded evidence that creative imitation could be the answer to the fundamental issue of L2 learning (i.e., mapping static language onto dynamic idea expression). The pedagogical implications as well as future research directions are also discussed.