In this paper, we test the L2 Status Factor (Bardel & Falk, 2007) by examining to what extent Dutch secondary school students (13–15 years) prefer L2 English over L1 Dutch in L3 French acquisition, and we study the influence of L2 education by comparing an English immersion curriculum vs. a regular Dutch curriculum. We investigate verb placement in declarative root clauses, viz. V-to-T movement, where the finite verb moves to T in French but not in English and V-to-C movement, in which the V2-rule applies in Dutch but not in French. We report data from a Grammaticality Judgement Task. The results indicate that in the immersion group there is significantly more influence from English than from Dutch. In the regular group, the L1 and the L2 are both important sources of transfer.

This longitudinal study investigates negative transfer from L1 Dutch and L2 English into L3 French in the first three years of French education in a Dutch/English secondary immersion school. We focus on two word order constructions in declarative root clauses where the three languages differ: V-to-C movement (+Dutch, −French) and V-toT movement (−English, +French). The results of a grammaticality judgement task and a gap-filling task show that the L3 learners transfer a large amount from L1 Dutch in the initial stages of the first year of French education followed by a dramatic decline in the second and third year of French education. At the onset of L3 learning, L2 English is less activated; however, its influence intervenes and stays stable in later years of learning.

In this study, we test the L2 Status Factor hypothesis (Bardel & Falk, 2007, 2012), which claims that the L2 is the preferred background language over the L1 in L3 acquisition (henceforth L3A), and we investigate the effect of L2 English exposure on the role of the L1 and the L2 in L3A. We examine how increased developmental L2 exposure changes L1/L2 influence in L3A by comparing third- to fourth-year secondary school students in the Netherlands who are enrolled in either an immersion or a traditional ‘regular’ secondary school programme. We look at verb placement where French differs from English or from Dutch, reporting data from a grammaticality judgement task.

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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.