Teaching English as third language

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cawatawa

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HI every one
Does anyone has information about teaching english as third language
i've heard that it is called "Lingua Franca"
your help is a support for me
Thank you
 

KJM85

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I think lingua franca is the language you speak which doesn't necessarily have to be your mother tongue, so lingua franca can be your second, third, fourth and so on language. usually you speak a lingua franca with people who have different mother tongues.. and I guess English is the most use language as lingua franca....
 

Raymott

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HI every one
Does anyone has information about teaching english as third language
i've heard that it is called "Lingua Franca"
your help is a support for me
Thank you
In the the academic subject and literature of Second language Acquisition, a third language is treated identically to a second language. The same teaching implications apply.
 

cawatawa

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so if someone has learnt french sine childhood then starts learning english as a third language in adulthood is the same ?
i think there are some differences
 

Raymott

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So if someone has learnt French since childhood then starts learning English as a third language in adulthood, it is the same ?
I think there are some differences
If someone has learnt French since childhood and then starts learning English, English is their second language - unless they have another language that you haven't mentioned.

Yes, I agree there are probably some differences. The major one is that a person generally doesn't learn proper applications of grammar until they try to learn a new language. So a person learning a third language would already be familiar with the concepts of tenses and conjugations, and the rest of it. But it would also depend on what the second language was. I would guess that a native Arabic speaker who learns English as a second language and then attempts Chinese as L3 would face similar problems to a native Arabic speaker who learns Chinese as an L2.

However, in linguistic circles, there isn't a formal discipline of L3 teaching with well-defined differences between L2 and L3 learning.
What do you think the differences might be?
 

Tdol

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There may be differences according the age you start at, etc, but you can learn six or any number of second languages- the fact that it's the third language you have studied doesn't affect the idea of second language learning- they're all second in relation to your first language.
 

cawatawa

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In other words: French is his second language
 

Tdol

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French and English would be second languages your example..
 

cawatawa

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What I've noticed is that english learners '' in Algeria" tend to map english and understand it through three stages:

1- Arabic simulation stage: they try to understand English by comparing between a highly inflectional language ('Arabic') with an uninflected language ('English'). For instance :" أكل عمر تفاحة" "Omar ate an apple" where "عمر " is a subject "أكل" is a verb and "تفاحة" is an object; they write it as follows : ate Omar an apple

2- French simulation stage: in that latter, they are able to get closer to the real meaning due to the similarities between English and French

3- Hybrid simulation stage: where the three languages are used to simulate the form and the content

I think that there is a difference between learning English as a second language or a third language
 

Tdol

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Wouldn't you need to test that by teaching a group English first and seeing how they learn French?
 

Raymott

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Wouldn't you need to test that by teaching a group English first and seeing how they learn French?

That wouldn't work, because cawatawa's hypothesis is about the difference between English as second and third languages. In your proposed trial, there are no English as a 3rd language learners - only French as a third language learners.

I agree that there are likely to be differences. I think the reason that ESL, and English-based SLA disciplines don't focus on L3 differences is that the students are more likely to be heterogenous. People from all over the world learn English, and most ESL classes in English-speaking countries have students from diverse backgrounds.
The Algerian Arabic -> French -> English scheme is a very specific limited example, and there might be grounds for Arabic speakers to be taught English differently if they already known French - which is similar to saying that one might teach English differently to French speakers than to Arabic speakers, if one had the luxury of a homogenous class.
 

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At school I learned the following foreign languages (in that order): English, French, and Russian. In each language we started with simple words and basic sentences. With every new chapter in the respective study book new words were introduced and the sentences would become more complex. Step by step grammar rules would be taught and we would be exposed to all the irregularities in each language. I very much doubt that anything would have been different if we had to learn these languages in a different order.

I am now trying to teach myself Thai and all the study books follow the same principles as above.

TomUK
 

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In the the academic subject and literature of Second language Acquisition, a third language is treated identically to a second language. The same teaching implications apply.

I agree, and would add that when it's a third language, it's often easier to teach than as a second language. You as a teacher can identify tendencies in both source languages and use them to help people in the third language.

For instance, in Hong Kong 90% of my French students were speakers of Hindi and Sindhi (a dialect of Hindi spoken in Sindh). I was able to teach the subjunctive with better success by relying on the students to come up with sentences in Hindi which I calculated, based on their feedback, would contain subjunctives similar to those in French.

Example: "She was afraid she might be late for the bus."

Also, bilingual people are more mentally flexible when it comes to "letting go" of the first language and back-translating absolutely everything. It helps to be bilingual before becoming trilingual.
 

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Also, bilingual people are more mentally flexible when it comes to "letting go" of the first language and back-translating absolutely everything. It helps to be bilingual before becoming trilingual.

Yes, and even people who are not truly bilingual but have acquired a certain degree of proficiency in a second language learn a third language more easily. I don't know why, but perhaps you break certain barriers in your brain or you develop certain abilities necessary to master a foreign language. Go figure.
 

5jj

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Yes, and even people who are not truly bilingual but have acquired a certain degree of proficiency in a second language learn a third language more easily. I don't know why, but perhaps you break certain barriers in your brain or you develop certain abilities necessary to master a foreign language. Go figure.
Except for when you acquire another language, or other languages as a young child - and are almost certainly not fully aware of the concept of 'another language' - learning your first foreign language involves some startling things. For somebody in whose own language negation is expressed by the equivalent of "I love not", "I not love" or "I no-love", the English "I do not love" is weird. It may take a long time to accept this; however, once it has been accepted, learners are not quite so shocked when they meet, in their second foreign language "I ne love pas". If, in their third foreign language, the negative turns out to be the equivalent of "I evol", well, so be it. The systems still have to be mastered, but they are no longer seen as outlandish.

That said, I do feel that it is almost certainly easier if your second foreign language is in the same language family. Thus, I would say that if a speaker of an African language, for example learnt French as their first foreign language, then they would find the difficulty of learning the second foreign language something like this:

Italian - easy. Italian and French are closely-related Romance languages.
Romanian - less easy. Romanian and French are both Romance languages, but not so closely related.
English - more difficult; English and French are both Indo-European languages, but different branches. However, English and French have a lot of vocabulary in common.
Czech - decidely more difficult. Czech and French are both Indo-European languages, but vey different in vocabulary and surface structure.
Turkish - very difficult. Turkish is not an Indo-European language, and both vocabulary and grammar are very different.
 

konungursvia

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Except for when you acquire another language, or other languages as a young child - and are almost certainly not fully aware of the concept of 'another language' - learning your first foreign language involves some startling things. For somebody in whose own language negation is expressed by the equivalent of "I love not", "I not love" or "I no-love", the English "I do not love" is weird. It may take a long time to accept this; however, once it has been accepted, learners are not quite so shocked when they meet, in their second foreign language "I ne love pas". If, in their third foreign language, the negative turns out to be the equivalent of "I evol", well, so be it. The systems still have to be mastered, but they are no longer seen as outlandish.

That said, I do feel that it is almost certainly easier if your second foreign language is in the same language family. Thus, I would say that if a speaker of an African language, for example learnt French as their first foreign language, then they would find the difficulty of learning the second foreign language something like this:

Italian - easy. Italian and French are closely-related Romance languages.
Romanian - less easy. Romanian and French are both Romance languages, but not so closely related.
English - more difficult; English and French are both Indo-European languages, but different branches. However, English and French have a lot of vocabulary in common.
Czech - decidely more difficult. Czech and French are both Indo-European languages, but vey different in vocabulary and surface structure.
Turkish - very difficult. Turkish is not an Indo-European language, and both vocabulary and grammar are very different.

First off, check out "New Italian Self-Taught" on Amazon, as well as the French and German versions.

Second, you're absolutely right. But strangely, English and French have both been cycling in and out of double negation for centuries. Strange but interesting. Chaucer wrote :

Whan that the Knyght had thus his tale ytoold,
In al the route ne was ther yong ne oold
That he ne seyde it was a noble storie,..

You had to have 2 ne's to make a not, for centuries, and it has been a pendulum swinging back and forth through time immemorial in all of the Scandianvian and Teutonic languages. Or most.
 

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You people are so erudite one seeps in knowledge in this website almost to the point of drowning. ;-)
 

konungursvia

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Wow, thank you.
 

Tdol

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That wouldn't work, because cawatawa's hypothesis is about the difference between English as second and third languages. In your proposed trial, there are no English as a 3rd language learners - only French as a third language learners.

You would have Arabic -> French -> English & Arabic -> English -> French to compare. You'd have two groups- one taught in the reverse order from the traditional French first pattern. Then you would have it as a second and third language. At least, that is what I meant. Sorry if I wasn't clear.
 
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