This article deals with multilingual students’ metalinguistic awareness in L3 French at the university level. The aim of the article is to study how the students’ multilingualism influences their lexical strategies in a meaning construction task and to answer the following research questions: What type of crosslinguistic influence can be observed in an oral meaning construction task of L1-L2-L3 cognate words? What kind of metalinguistic strategies do the multilingual learners adopt in this test? The corpus consists of 12 first year students’ productions; students were divided into three different proficiency levels (evaluated with a DIALANG test). The results show that the deliberate activation of L3, L2s and L1 by cognate words had a great impact on the meaning construction of the L3 words. Nevertheless, well learned common words seemed to resist this (combined) crosslinguistic influence. The analysis also revealed that in meaning construction, the participants had recourse to several form- and/or meaning-based strategies which, however, were not always successful.