L'effet du bilinguisme sur l'acquisition du français – langue troisième
Influence of Bilingualism an Acquisition of French as the Third Language

Summary/Abstract: In this age of the uniting Europe, according to the European Coundl's recommendation, citizens of the continent ought to receive education allowing them to communicate in their mother tongue, in the language serving as lingua franca, finally in the language of a neighbouring country or other European one. This forces us to adjust to these requirements not only the educational system, but also methods of education, including the school curricula and sylabuses, which take into account the different way of acquiring a foreign language - not the second after the mother tongue, but the third (after the mother tongue and the foreign language). Such analyses are a continuation of researches ont the interference. The researches on bilinguality have been successfully developed for the past thirty years, after years of stagnation due to lack of methodological tools. A similar situation exists in the case of trilinguality. For it is impossible to transplant the already used methodology into the new, extended ground. Trilinguality turned out to be extraordinarily difficult to examine. The competence of a multilingual person cannot be a simple sum of competences in the particular languages, but rather their resultant. Thus, we encounter an utterly new type of competence, right now difficult to define and describe precisely because of lack of appropriate researches. It demands a new look at the selection of methodological tools allowing a precise diagnosis of the problem and a verification of hypotheses explaining the way of acquisition of the successive languages.

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