Lexical Transfer in English (L3) Production within a Multilingual Immersion Setting

Abstract

Although lexical transfer has been widely investigated in bilingual contexts, relatively little attention has been given to multilingual immersion environment where Indonesian (L1), Arabic (L2), and English (L3) are systematically used for daily communication. The study aims to identify patterns of lexical transfer and their directionality in students’ English (L3) production. Using a descriptive qualitative design, data were collected through observations, audio-recorded interactions, interviews, and questionnaires, and were analyzed qualitatively to identify patterns and directions of lexical transfer. The findings show that calques were the most frequent form of lexical transfer (58.82%), followed by borrowing (32.35%) and collocations (8.82%). The predominance of calques indicates that meaning based transfer was particularly salient in the observed data. This pattern is consistent with the predominance of L1 to L3 transfer, indicating that Indonesian plays a central role in conceptual mapping during English production, whereas L2 to L3 transfer occurred mainly in religious and institutional vocabulary. These findings suggest that language transfer is better understood as a manifestation of cognitive processing in multilingual environment rather than merely as a linguistic error, with the cognitively dominant language being more readily accessed during target language production.