The influence of L2 English on L3 French acquisition in bilingual education*

In the present paper, we compare L2 English influence on French third language acquisition (L3A) in first-year and third-year bilingual stream secondary school students and in third-year mainstream secondary school students by means of a gap-filling task. We found that the influence of L2 English on French L3A increases from first- to third-year bilingual students, which is not the case in the mainstream group. This raises the question if L2 influence on L3A in bilingual education is the result of the increased L2 exposure or of a higher L2 proficiency, factors that both have been claimed to play a role in L3A-research (Hammarberg, 2001; Tremblay, 2006; Jaensch, 2009). The results of this study show that there is no individual correlation between L2 English proficiency and influence of English in L3 French learning. Therefore, we suggest that it is L2 exposure rather than L2 proficiency that leads to more influence of the L2 in L3 French.