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Learning multiple languages, which is a kind of desirable ability, is increasingly becoming common in recent years. It was reported that there were about eighty-four percent of the Europeans believe that everyone in the European Union was supposed to speak an L2 fluently (European Commission Special Barometer, 2006). Also, the acquisition of English as a third language is quite common across the world (Cenoz & Jessner, 2000). The spread of English and the growth of multilingualism with English in Europe have set off much attention not only in Europe but all over the world (Hoffmann, 2000).

Within the third language acquisition framework, cross-linguistic influence (Kellerman & Sharwood Smith, 1986), which has been the quintessence in the interlanguage hypothesis theory (Selinker, 1992), is now catching people’s eyes again. Cross-linguistic influence is a research hotspot within second language acquisition based on the generative grammar theory in the 20th century (Yu, Chang, & Jiang, 2012). Thereby, some scholars follow Chomsky’s (Chomsky, 1995) Minimalist Program(MP) to find a reasonable account explaining the occurrence of cross-linguistic influence while other researchers follow developmental stages theory, based on the cognitive, processing and/or pragmatic principles (Klein & Perdue, 1992; Pienemann, 1998).

1.2 Aims of the study

This paper was designed to explore the cross-linguistic influence in the third language acquisition in college context. It aimed to look at how Chinese Spanish major students processed their productions especially in sentential adjective placement in Spanish by designing questionnaire to examine different roles played by respective languages they have learned. In short, it was committed to seek out what roles participants’ L1 Chinese and L2 English played in their writing production.

In addition, this study targeted to find the relationship between cross-linguistic influence and participants’ linguistic proficiency of Spanish which was seen as the equivalence of participants’ grade in this paper. Therefore, the relationship between the cross-linguistic influence and linguistic proficiency could be interpreted by investigating the connection between participants’ language bank and their grade.

Moreover, the present study devoted to find the main source language of cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of word order of adjective placement in Spanish and to find the mechanism which would illustrate why and how this source language exerted cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of target structures.

Finally, this study was in quest of getting more implicational experience for future Spanish language teaching and learning.

Chapter 2 Literature Review

2.1 Fundamental concepts

2.1.1 Third language acquisition

Third language acquisition (TLA) is defined by Hammarberg (2010) as “in dealing with the linguistic situation of a multilingual, third language acquisition refers to a non-native language which is currently being used or acquired in a situation wher本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。