Type of course

Admission requirements

Compulsory previous knowledge:

Fulfilled master¿s degree and admission to the PhD programme with a fully developed project description.

Target group: Doctoral students in linguistics or any related area to language acquisition (e.g. speech and hearing sciences, psychology, cognitive science).

The admission proceeds according to the target groups and categories 1-3 described in the Regulations for the degree of Philosophiae Doctor, Section 10.

• category 1: doctoral students at UiT
• category 2: Participants in the Associate Professor Programme at UiT who fulfil the preliminary knowledge requirements
• category 3: doctoral students from other universities

Course content

The course is divided into 5 days (M, T, W, Th, F), with 4 hours of classes per day. Each day, class will take place for two hours before lunch, and two hours after lunch.

Three hours per day will consist of teaching (15 hours total), with one hour reserved for student presentation of articles related to the day¿s topic.

Class I: Introduction to Third Language Acquisition

• Discussion of Rothman, Cabrelli Amaro & de Bot (2013)
• Overview of the broad field
• Sociolinguistic and educational approaches
• Cognitive approaches/psycholinguistic approaches
• Formal linguistic approaches

Class II  General Issues

• Main questions in the study of adult L3 acquisition;
• Who are L3 learners; inclusion and exclusion criteria;
• Deriving research questions;
• Why and how L3 must be studied separately from L2 acquisition;
• Adult versus child multilingualism

Class III: Morphosyntax

• Models of L3 initial stages:
  • The Cumulative Enhancement Model
  • The L2 Status Factor
  • The Typological Primacy Model
  • Considering other possibilities of initial stages transfer in L3: an L1 Factor, no transfer
• What does the start of L3 tell us about the so-called critical period?
• Developmental and ultimate attainment predictions/data

Class IV: Phonology

• Bilingual advantages for continued phonological acquisition
• Examining L3 phonological acquisition to inform questions of UG accessibility in adulthood
• Phonology and the L3 initial stages models
• L3 phonological development
• Regressive L3 phonological transfer

Class V: Methodology in L3 studies

• Choosing structures and language pairings
• The Mirror Image Approach
• Offline behavioural measures
• Online behavioural measures
• Neurolinguistic measures

Objectives of the course

Language of instruction and examination

Teaching methods

The instruction involves class attendance and lasts for five days. 

The course has a topical structure, pertaining to one general topic per day:

Class I: Introduction to Third Language Acquisition

Class II  General Issues

Class III: Morphosyntax

Class IV: Phonology

Class V: Methodology in L3 studies

The instruction is given in the Spring term.

Assessment

The PhD candidates must read the articles assigned for the course prior to the start of the first day of class.
It is strongly recommended that students write a one page summary of each paper to bring to class, critically summarizing the main points and argumentation of the papers (where relevant details on the methodology, languages, structures, research questions, hypotheses, and results should be included as well). Students will be required to present one article (or more, depending on class size) during the course.

Participation and 80% attendance are obligatory.

The assessment of the work requirements is made on an approved/not approved basis.

Required assessment: A sample grant application for a study that could be done on adult L3 acquisition and that reflects directly some of the theories discussed in class. Maximum length of the paper is 6 pages, single spaced (not including references cited). Sample grants will be provided for reference on the first day of class.

The topic for the paper must be approved by the instructors no later than the last day of class. The completed paper is due six weeks after completion of the course, and examination is evaluated according to the pass/fail grading system.

The sample grant must include:

• a relevant literature review;
• research questions and hypotheses;
• a sufficiently detailed methodology of the project;
• a discussion/conclusion section that details what the expection of findings is and how this adds to the field more generally.

Students who have failed may register for a re-sit examination.

Recommended reading/syllabus