This chapter presents and discusses the methodological approach of case study in connection with research on third language acquisition and other areas of multilingualism and gives an overview of occurring case studies in these fields. After a brief introduction, the first section deals with the purpose of case study and characteristic features such as the real-life orientation and the holistic perspective, as well as the issue of generalizability. The second section discusses the nature and development of multilingual linguistic repertoires. Case studies here often cover large and complex repertoires. The overview of studies in the next section has a main focus on the third language acquisition area, but also deals with related thematic areas such as intercomprehension processes, polyglotism, linguistic autobiographies, and studies visualizing the multilingual subject.

Quite often, adult language learners are already familiar with one or more second languages at the point at which they start learning a new one. This type of situation is probably becoming even more frequent in the present-day society, due to several factors: an increase in travelling and working abroad, greater focus on languages in education, greater exposure to other languages through the media, and so on. Prior L2 knowledge is often mentioned as a source of influence on the acquisition of a new language. Despite this, there have as yet been very few comprehensive studies carried out in order to investigate the influence of previously learned second languages on the new language being learned (cf. the bibliography by Henriksson and Ringbom 1985, and the survey of previous research in Ringbom 1987: 112ff). This situation may be due to an assumption that the influence of prior L2 knowledge is generally weak or insignificant, or the difficulty in finding suitable situations in practice where the interaction between prior L1 and L2 knowledge and the developing new language can be studied.

In the following, we will distinguish between the first language (L1), prior second languages (L2s), and the language that the learner is currently acquiring, which we will label the third language (L3). We will present an outline of a longitudinal case study of one learner's acquisition of Swedish as a third language, and give some examples to illustrate a few, as yet very preliminary findings.

In the last few years, systematic research on third language acquisition has gained momentum and attracted increasing attention as a crucial part of the wider field of individual multilingualism. The studies presented here zoom in on the acquisitional activities of the individual learner and the patterns of crosslinguistic influence which arise in the multilingual setting.

WHY A THIRD LANGUAGE PERSPECTIVE?

Non-native language acquisition has for the most part been studied in terms of foreign or ‘second’ language acquisition (SLA). Even if it is understood that learners often know more languages, the possible influence of prior non-native languages on the process of acquisition has in the past been assumed by most SLA linguists to be insignificant, and hence usually disregarded. The learner's first language (L1) was the only background language to which attention was paid. In this tradition all cases of non-native language acquisition were analysed as second language (L2) acquisition, and no difference was made between a previously monolingual and a bi- or multilingual language learner. The concepts of L2 and SLA came to cover non-native languages generally. The upcoming focus on third language (L3) acquisition means that researchers have begun to differentiate learners according to the complexity of their linguistic background.

There are a range of reasons for the interest in L3 acquisition. For the sake of the discussion we may distinguish practical, theoretical and empirical types of motives.

INTRODUCTION

It has long been recognised that languages differ phonetically not only in their distinctive segments and prosodic features, but also in the characteristic ways in which the phonetic gestures are ‘set’, i.e. the Artikulationsbasis, articulatory settings (Honikman 1964; Laver 1980), or phonetic settings (Laver 1994). The discussion of Artikulationsbasis has a long history in the phonetic literature, especially from the point of view of the overall characterisation and contrastive description of the pronunciation of different languages (see Kelz 1971; Laver 1978; Jenner 2001 for historical accounts). Not least the great nineteenth-century phoneticians, such as Sievers, Viëtor, Sweet and Jespersen, emphasised and tried to portray cross-language differences concerning basis of articulation. In recent literature in English, the term articulatory settings (introduced by Honikman 1964) is widely used. Laver (1980, 1994) gives an extensive account of various dimensions and values of settings as features of people's habitual voice quality. Although he is primarily concerned with voice phenomena in the individual speaker, he also points out the relevance of settings for the characterisation of specific languages or language varieties (Laver 1994: 423ff). Regional variation of dialects, too, is characterised in part by differences in voice quality, an aspect which Elert has applied to Swedish dialect research (Elert 1984; Elert and Br. Hammarberg 1991). Likewise, voice can be an aspect of sociolectal variation (Esling 1978a, 1978b), and can function as a social marker of the speaker (Trudgill 1974; Laver and Trudgill 1979).

This volume presents a series of studies of an adult multilingual speaker who acquires a new language through social interaction. Five of the chapters have been published individually as articles at diverse places and are now gathered here together with an introduction and an added sixth chapter. They all emanate from a project conducted at Stockholm University which, as it matured, was named Processes in Third Language Acquisition.

This project started in 1990 when the young British linguist Sarah Williams arrived in Sweden to take up a job at Stockholm University and was faced with the need to learn Swedish. She saw this at the same time as an opportunity to document her progress in a new language from the outset. To this end, she and the present writer started to audio-record conversations in Swedish between the two of us at regular intervals in order to compile a longitudinal language corpus. This was continued for two academic years. During this time, we refrained from performing any analyses on the material, just aiming to bring together a broad corpus of semispontaneous conversational speech for later study. Sarah thus came to perform the methodologically rather unusual, but manifestly fruitful role of first serving as a language learner and supplier of data, and later, when the data collection was finished and her competence in Swedish was stronger, acting as a researcher of her own previous language performance together with the present writer.

INTRODUCTION

In the majority of studies of crosslinguistic influence in L2 acquisition, usually only the L1 is taken into account. In the case of a bilingual or polyglot, this may well be an oversimplification of the situation. A previously learned language (referred to here as an L2) may also have an influence on a learner's production in a new target language (referred to here as L3). The aim of the following is to explore similarities and differences in the occurrence of L1 English and L2 German in what we refer to as non-adapted language switches using a case study of the first two years of L3 production in an adult learner of L3 whose background languages are L1 English and L2 German, and to propose a developmental model of L3 production.

The influence of previously learned languages on a learner's production in the target language may show itself not only in the form of crosslinguistic influence on the learner's interlanguage (IL) but also in the non-target-language-adapted (non-TL-adapted) occurrence of non-L3 languages during target language production. Intentional language switching is referred to in the bilingualism literature in terms of code-switching, borrowing or language mixing. In the L2 literature such language switching is referred to largely in terms of communication strategies (Bialystok 1983; Færch and Kasper 1983) used by the learner to overcome problems arising from a limited lexicon.

INTRODUCTION

The 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.

INTRODUCTION

For 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.