69 ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ ARTICLES MARTÍN TESTA University of Warsaw The Psycholinguistic Background of L1 Polish Students of L3 Spanish Abstract. Te study was aimed at exploring the psycholinguistic background of Polish students of L3 Spanish. Two groups of students (B1 and B2) were asked to fll out a survey with questions related to profciency, self-confdence, language identity, usefulness, prestige, stress, sound, and frequency of use. Te last part of the survey included some questions about psychotypology, as well. In terms of foreign language anxiety, Spanish was ranked by most of the students as the most stressful language. A follow-up session was carried out with them in order to try to discuss the reasons behind their choices, and their feedback helped to shed some light on the topic and raised further questions about the role and impact of Polish teachers of Spanish in Poland. Keywords: sociolinguistics, stress, foreign language anxiety, L3 Spanish, third language acquisition, multilingual- ism, psychotypology. 1. Introduction Te following study was aimed at exploring the psycholinguistic background of Polish students of L3 Spanish from a multilingual point of view. Tat is why, the study begins with a short sum- mary of the the situation of English both in Europe and, more precisely, in Poland in order to give a general picture of the linguistic situation in which the participants of this study grew up. Te next section deals with the impact of positive attitudes on language learning and a short review of Dewaele’s (2010) fndings in terms of foreign language anxiety (FLA). Our study consisted of two groups who had to fll out a survey (see Appendix) with questions related to profciency, self- confdence, language identity, usefulness, prestige, stress, sound, and frequency of use. Further- more, the last part of the survey included some questions about psychotypology , i.e. the perception of linguistic distance between languages. Te study was motivated, in the frst place, by many observations with regard to the way Polish students seemed to relate to the languages they studied: Before carrying out this study, we were pretty much convinced (especially afer Poland’s joining the EU in 2004) that English had become an increasingly “stressful” language, basically because it is mostly associated with work, business, and obligations. On the other hand, Spanish seemed to be mostly associated with holidays, leisure time, and fun. Tat is why it was surprising when Spanish was ranked by most of the students as 10.15290/CR.2018.22.3.04