With the reception and production of the three test structures among the CEF participants examined, this chapter aims to offer an overall discussion of the findings in the previous chapters in terms of the core research question and hypotheses as stated in Chapter 2, repeated here:

• • Research question. Does the acquisition of a later acquired language (here, French) have any effect on the reception and production of an earlier acquired non-native language (i.e. English)?

• • Hypothesis 1. Under the influence of their L3 French, the CEF participants will differ from their CE peers in terms of their reception and production of three English structures.

• • Hypothesis 2. Under the influence of their L1 Chinese, both CEF and CE participants will judge the selected English structures differently from the native controls and produce more non-target instances of the English structures than the native controls.

This chapter will begin with a summary of all the key observations about the CEF participants in terms of the above research question/concerns. These observations are then discussed in an attempt to arrive at the answers to the two hypotheses, one on possible L3 French – L2 English reverse transfer and the other on the possible vulnerability of the internal interfaces. Pedagogical implications and several areas for further research are proposed to mark the end of the discussion of the L3 French – L2 English Project.

Summary of the Major Findings

To address the core research question of whether a later acquired language (i.e. L3) has an effect on an earlier acquired one (i.e. L2), three times offline language tasks were used to examine the reception and production of three English structures among the CEF participants. Among these three tasks, the receptive ones, that is, the grammaticality judgement-correction task and the cloze task, did not reveal any significant differences between the CEF and CE participants, thus suggesting the absence of both reverse transfer from L3 French to L2 English in the CEF multilinguals and possible vulnerability of the two internal interfaces (i.e. syntax–morphology and syntax–semantics).