LEARNING STRATEGIES IN READING COMPREHENSION OF TRILINGUAL ADVANCED LEARNERS: COMPARING L2 AND L3 STUDY HABITS

While a number of studies have been carried out on bilingual learners, their way of processing language or dealing with problems, less research has been done about trilingual learners with balanced proficiency in L2 and L3. In particular, finding out how such balanced trilinguals approach reading tasks and how they acquire vocabulary from the written context in both of their foreign languages is an interesting area of investigation. The main objective of our study was to examine the use of reading strategies by first-year university trilingual students studying Applied Linguistics in English-German and German-English language combination in a middle-sited public university in Poland. Investigating the frequency of the use of different kinds of reading strategies was accomplished through analysis of a reading comprehension test, a questionnaire on reading comprehension strategies and learning diaries kept by the two groups of the aforementioned trilingual students.