Fighting interference? Ha. I'm embracing it.
Basically, mixing up exposure tasks does little to help me with interference. More than that, when I switch from reading/listening to one language to the next and then yet another one, my brain thinks it's ok to do the same when speaking.
During my time in Spain I kind of got used to replying automatically in the language people around me are using, and it seems I am slowly reaching that stage in French too. But my French still sucks, people here also speak English and German/Spanish, so somehow we end up having bi- or trilingual conversations. It's fun. (Pensez au tri si vous avez une conversation trilingue.)
So I think, one important strategy people don't seem to have mentioned (did I skip reading it?) is to utilize your knowledge about the other person and the situation you're in.
We do this automatically in our native languages all the time. When we know somebody we refer to common ground knowledge, we keep track of what we know about them and what they should know about us and probably know about certain topics, and change the way we talk based on that mix of knowledge and assumptions, adjusting it with the feedback we get from the other person or people (good speakers even from an audience!)
That kind of knowledge can be used to choose the language you're talking in. Doing that seems to basically help tagging vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar patterns as 'French' and 'Spanish', for example - I can't really explain it well; without this focus on another person I have positive associations between different features of one language, while with this focus I also have those features tagged to be rejected when I'm talking to a person who doesn't speak/understand that language.
That does have some weird effects of me suddenly not being able to access cognates pairs between German/Spanish or English/Spanish that I could use just fine before, because I haven't yet sorted out how these words relate to French.
And I experience much more interference when I know the other person will understand it if I end up mixing in a certain language, because then I don't monitor my speech as closely to only say things I'm relatively sure of and paraphrase the rest.
Statistics: Posted by Bao — Mon Jan 11, 2016 3:30 pm