Orthografieerwerb in der L3

The present paper focuses on the acquisition of orthographic knowledge by Italian students whose L3 is German. To date, this aspect of L3 learning has been neglected by most researchers. The analysis presented here is based on a corpus of short dictated texts and addresses various aspects of the L3 writing process in German (students' L1 is Italian, the L2is English). The authors explore the mechanisms that actually underlie the L3 writing process through a systematic classification of spelling errors according to the type of knowledge retrieved within the ‘multi-competence’. The hypothesis is that multi-competence is made up of distinguishable and interrelated modules, since there is evidence for knowledge transfer from one module to another. Positive and negative transfer into the interlanguage not only originates from the L1 and L2. Transfer also occurs from the new and still uncertain L3 knowledge and concerns both rule-based and memory-based knowledge.