Decontextualized definitions in L1, L2, and L3: Is there a relationship?

摘要

Our study addressed a cognitive issue in a context involving three languages, Arabic, French and English. We examined the decontextualization skills (DS) of 230 Tunisian students aged 16–17 years through their written definitions in L1, L2 and L3. Our objective was to investigate whether these skills were related between the three languages and whether language distance, language proficiency and intelligence had an effect on the results. DS proved to be interdependent across languages and independent of language distance. Language proficiency and intelligence were significant predictors of DS without being their mainstay. DS seemed to go beyond academic skills to involve metacognitive skills. The relationship of interdependence led us to suggest three types of transfer, bidirectional transfer, downstream transfer and upstream transfer; which seemed to depend mainly on the level of language proficiency.