I attended the AAAL (American Association for Applied Linguistics) Dallas 2013 in Dallas, Texas, March, 2013. I presented my research entitled “L2 accent transfer in L3 production: Evidence from L3 Korean”. This is my first participation in AAAL, which I’ve heard a lot from the Applied Linguistics people and yes, it was a valuable opportunity to look at the practical techniques and theories applied in real classroom settings. My research is about multilingual effects in the acquisition of foreign language. This research was simply motivated from some of my students who are English native speakers who learned Japanese before learning Korean. They showed very interesting patterns in that they had very strong Japanese accents in their Korean production even though their native language is English.
Therefore, I tried to answer the question of whether the L2 overrides L1 in the L3 acquisition (especially for the accent) in my research, “The influence of the second language in third language acquisition”. As a means to assess the degree of influence of the L1 accent and L2 accent in L3 production, an experiment involving the perceptual judgment of a foreign accent was developed. Two groups of native English speakers [(i) five who had not learned any languages other than Korean, and (ii) five who had learned Japanese before learning Korean] produced Korean sentences, and 15 native Korean speakers ranked each production according to the speaker’s dominant accent, either English or Japanese. Based on the results of the quantitative analysis, it is argued that L2 exerts an influence on L3 accent; however, this interference is reduced with an increase in L3 proficiency.
I’m always deeply grateful to the BLC for providing funding me to attend conferences. Thank you again for your financial support, BLC!