Abstract
The present research project examines Third Language Acquisition (L3 English) within the context of Italian-medium primary schools in bilingual South Tyrol, Italy, taking early-stage receptive competence in morphosyntactic structures as a focus. Existing research indicates a qualitative difference between Second Language Learning and Third Language Acquisition, and certain psycholinguistic and developmental aspects to multilingual learners merit investigation. The theoretical framework is
Processability Theory (PT), which examines learner interlanguage from a processing perspective, proposing a series of stages that learners pass through in an incremental manner. The main part of the study involves two groups of participants (n=126) and utilizes the Early Language and Intercultural Acquisition Studies Grammar Test (ELIAS GT) – a picture selection task – as an instrument.
Implicational scaling methods are used for the analysis, and results are also examined in the light of the PT-derived Developmentally Moderated Transfer Hypothesis. The project aims to highlight the role that processing approaches to acquisition proposing constraints on developmental readiness and crosslinguistic influence may play for the emergence of receptive competence in morphosyntactic structures in a bilingual Italian-German population. It additionally offers implications for classrooms in the multilingual context.