Cross-Linguistic Interference: L1, L2, L3 (+) Acquisition of French Adverbial Pronouns en and y by Bilingual Spanish and English-Speaking Students of the University of Puerto Rico - Río Piedras: Implicit-Inductive Teaching/Learning Versus Explicitteachin

This is a longitudinal case study of two groups of students (24 students in total) from the Foreign Languages Department of the University of Puerto Rico -- Rio Piedras. This research deals with the acquisition of the French adverbial pronouns en and y through two different teaching approaches, the implicit-inductive teaching method (10 students) versus the explicit-deductive teaching approach (14 students). The study also focused on students who have Italian or Portuguese as a third language, in addition to Spanish and English. This study analyzed the possible interferences and influences of English, Italian and Portuguese in the acquisition of the French clitics en and y. A preand post-test approach was used to evaluate the learning progress of the students. Three different statistical methods were used including t student, z test, and ANOVA in order to obtain the most accurate results from the data collected, and establish the difference or similarity between them.;My first hypothesis is that the implicit-inductive learning group will perform better than the explicit-deductive learning one. My second hypothesis is that the Italian L3 students will outperform the high-proficient students in English and L3 Portuguese students. However, The results of the independent variables data suggest that the linguistic or extralinguistic factors within each group (deductive versus inductive learning method) did not influence the students' performance since the outcomes show that there is no statistically significant difference between the groups.;Furthermore, the results of the dependent variables show that the Italian group did not outperform the English high-proficiency group, despite the existence of equivalent pronouns ci and ne in Italian, respectively en and y in French.