Developing Multilingual Competence in Academia: teaching German as L3 to Polish Students of English Department

The paper addresses the issue of developing multilingual competence in academia on the example of teaching German as L3 to students of English Philology in Poland. A thesis is put forward that despite a serious risk of negative transfer from L2 (English), instructors of German as a Foreign Language (GFL) in tertiary educational settings can largely benefit from resorting to students´ linguistic competence and learning strategies developed during L2 instruction. Pedagogical implications and teaching suggestions presented in the paper result from the author´s experience of teaching GFL to undergraduate students of English Department at one of the Polish universities