ABSTRACT
A significant proportion of students attending post-secondary educational institutions in the US have Spanish in their linguistic repertoire. Several institutions capitalize on these students’ bilingual skills to develop proficiency in additional languages, especially cognate systems that can be acquired faster, such as French, Italian, and Portuguese. Among the attributes that characterize the acquisition of cognate languages, one finds a faster acquisition process, high competence in receptive skills, and ease of communication from the beginning, all due to facilitative transfer. Non-facilitative transfer, on the other hand, is responsible for a great deal of unwelcome cross-linguistic interference and early fossilization of non-target like features. Given current evidence for the importance of typological similarity in L3 acquisition (e.g., Rothman, 2010, 2011), curricular designers have sought to develop methods that emphasize cross-metalinguistic awareness that is believed to facilitate acquisition of Italian (Donato & Oliva, in preparation), French (Donato, Bordage, & Rustin, 2012; Oliva & Donato, 2015), and Portuguese (Carvalho, Freire, & Silva, 2010; among others) by Spanish speakers in educational settings in the US.
