A close look at how context of acquisition of previous languages influences third language pedagogy: Does one model fit all?

A significant proportion of college students in the United States have Spanish in their linguistic repertoire. Several language programs capitalize on these students' bilingual skills to offer them the opportunity to develop proficiency in additional languages, especially cognate systems that can be acquired faster, such as French, Italian, and Portuguese. In this article, I first offer a synopsis of the research that has been developed on the acquisition of cognate languages in general, and the acquisition of Portuguese by Spanish speakers in particular. I then focus on the main premises that are considered in the curriculum designed to teach Portuguese for Spanish speakers in educational settings in the United States, pinpointing a tendency to treat Spanish speakers as a homogeneous group. Finally, I focus on incipient research that points to differences in patterns ofL3 acquisition by learners who speak Spanish as their first, second, or heritage language, and problematize the assumption that they make up a homogeneous group with similar pedagogical needs. While possible differences among L3 learners due to different contexts of acquisition of previous languages have been pointed out by previous research, only a few studies have investigated these dissimilarities. This article aims to contribute to this growing area of research by exploring important differences among English- Spanish bilingual learners of L3 Portuguese who acquired Spanish as their L2 or heritage language both in terms of their performance in class and in terms of their perception of the learning process through an examination of previous studies and incipient survey data. It concludes that while L2 Spanish speakers benefit more from explicit teaching due to previous experience as language learners that lead to a higher level of metalinguistic awareness, heritage Spanish speakers are less fluent in metalinguistic terminology and an explicit understanding of grammar, and as such benefit from more implicit, naturalistic activities that rely on their intuition. Lastly, a number of important implications for curricular adjustments that cater for both types of Spanish speakers in L3 Portuguese classes are offered.