Characteristic features of individual multilingualism acquired during formal instruction. The analysis based on Polish students of English Philology learning German as an additional language

The complex phenomenon of the multilingual competence, which cannot be viewed as the sum of competences in every single language known to the speaker, not only requires a detailed analysis of its different aspects but should also be the subject of learners’ reflection. The following paper examines the outcome of a questionnaire which was a part of an empirical pilot study made among Polish students of English Philology learning German as an additional language during the academic year 2013. It is aimed to show some complexities that characterize tertiary language acquisition (TLA) in the sequential constellation English as the first (L2) and German as the second foreign language (L3) and to find out how the state of being multilingual is perceived by the learners themselves referring to the role played by English in the acquisition of German, the kind of interaction between Polish, English and German in both production and reception taking place within different language subsystems as well as the influence of multilingualism on the shaping of metalinguistic awareness. Recent concepts of multilingual language acquisition and the outcome of research focused on cross-linguistic influence in a multilingual mind have been taken as the basis for examining the learners’ reflection