The influence of the mother tongue and of multilingualism on the available lexicon in Spanish as a foreign language

Numerous authors advocate the inclusion of the mother tongue in the teaching of foreign languages in pursuit of a more positive learning, which shows its influence on students' linguistic competence, and more specifically on their lexical competence. In addition, other scholars defend the benefit of multilingualism within this educational context. Therefore, the interest that these two factors arouse in the field of research and language teaching is evident. In this sense, this work aims to analyse the influence of the mother tongue (Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese Chinese, and, consequently, bilingualism in both languages) and the knowledge of several foreign languages on the lexical availability of Chinese-speaking learners of Spanish as a foreign language. A series of statistical analyses showed that the mother tongue did not have, from a quantitative perspective, a significant effect, whereas the multilingual competence was influential on the initial stages of the learning process.