Looking Beyond Students’ Language Learning and Attitudes Towards Three Languages In Contact

This study aims to examine attitudes towards Romanian, Spanish and English in a group of 124 Romanian native speakers from Romania, aged 15-18 years old, that were exposed to Spanish and English as a foreign language in Secondary Education. It is commonly believe that learning a third language is easier than learning a second and thus, the bilingual learners cognitively benefit from their prior language learning. Drawing upon empirical data gathered from a questionnaire with 52 items, this study advances the idea that are no significant differences between the attitudes towards the three languages: Romanian, Spanish and English. On the other hand, our results suggest that students’ positive attitudes towards English revealed a stronger trilingual identity of the participants of our study. Furthermore, results have also indicated that there are several significant differences in Romanian and Spanish attitudes between the learners (n = 22) who have studied for several years in Western countries or with parents working there, than their peers who have never been in interaction with other cultures.