Third Language Acquisition

Mehdi Zoauoui 
University of Khemis-Miliana, Algeria

      "So now they've made our tongue a gallimaufry or hodgepodge of other speeches" Edmund Spenser

       English as a native , as a quasi-official  and as a second language has a different impacts on how we acquire a creature that evolves from stage to stage, from downs to ups, and from synthetic to a more analytic feature; this latter issue is exacerbated by the fact that in some countries there are other languages and vernaculars vacillating between official and non-official state as English does and strives for. This given state can be depicted in Algeria where French shares a linguistic official state with Arabic, whereas the Algerian vernacular is said to be a mixture of the aforesaid languages.

The bugbear of such situation is conspicuous when dealing with young or adult learners trying to acquire English: Do they compare English with Arabic or French? Do they use Arabic/English Interlanguage or French/English Interlanguage? Should we rethink  Second Language Acquisition to Third Language Acquisition?

   In this article we'll try to express some concerns about learning a third language within a competing second language that shares a quasi-linguistic dominance over the Vernacular of the learners. So we'll death that issue from a contrastive analytical aspect.

  Most scholars define Second Language as the Language being learned or acquired or spoken other than the mother tongue , however it seems embarrassing to some extent when defining second language being so, does an Algerian acquire a third language as he did when acquiring French(almost since the primary school).Here is an example of a high school student typical error :I like not the cats.

If we try to compare that sentence with French and Arabic, we'll have that equivalents:

) أنا لا أحب القطط) Arabic:/ ana la ?ohibo el qitat/ (just an approximation):

French: Je n'aime pas  les chats.

In this example, what is the expected language that the student might have taken as a resource of building his sentence?

It seems that he has taken French as a support for his sentence since French has two particles in representing negation, unlike Arabic which needs only an ante-negation particle and if he has taken Arabic as a resource it would be : I not like cats.

ََTo be continued