The Acquisition of French as a Second Language: New developmental perspectives

175 Pages·2014·0.878 MB·

by  Christina Lindqvist, Camilla Bardel

The Acquisition of French as a Second Language
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Volume 62
The Acquisition of French as a Second Language. New developmental perspectives
Edited by Christina Lindqvist and Camilla Bardel
These materials were previously published in Language, Interaction and
Acquisition 3:1 (2012)
The Acquisition of French
as a Second Language
New developmental perspectives
Edited by
Christina Lindqvist
Uppsala University
Camilla Bardel
Stockholm University
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Acquisition of French as a Second Language : New developmental perspectives /
Edited by Christina Lindqvist and Camilla Bardel.
p. cm. (Benjamins Current Topics, issn 1874-0081 ; v. 62)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. French language--Study and teaching--Foreign speakers. 2. French language--
Grammar--Study and teaching. 3. Second language acquisition. I. Lindqvist,
Christina, editor of compilation. II. Bardel, Camilla, editor of compilation.
PC2065.A37 2014
448.0071--dc23 2014008328
isbn 978 90 272 4250 1 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 7007 8 (Eb)
© 2014 – John Benjamins B.V.
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other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Table of contents
Introduction
The acquisition of French as a second language: New developmental
perspectives 1
Camilla Bardel and Christina Lindqvist
Synthèse rétrospective et nouvelles perspectives développementales: Les
recherches acquisitionnelles en français L2 à l’Université de Stockholm 7
Inge Bartning
Pragmatic use of temporal adverbs in L1 and L2 French: Functions and
syntactic positions of textual markers in a spoken corpus 29
Victorine Hancock
La dislocation dans le français oral d’apprenants suédophones: Emploi et
développement 53
Hugues Engel
Vocabulary aspects of advanced L2 French: Do lexical formulaic
sequences and lexical richness develop at the same rate? 75
Fanny Forsberg Lundell and Christina Lindqvist
Formulaic and proceduralised language in the initial and advanced
stages of learning French 95
Richard Towell
The acquisition of additive scope particles by Moroccan Arabic L1
learners of French 117
Georges Daniel Véronique
Development of object clitics in child L2 French: A comparison of
developmental sequences in different modes of acquisition 143
Jonas Granfeldt
Subject index 167

Introduction
The acquisition of French as a second language
New developmental perspectives
Camilla Bardel and Christina Lindqvist
Stockholm University / Uppsala University
Research on French as a second language (L2) has had an important role in second
language acquisition (SLA) research for several years and it is constantly devel-
oping, especially in the European context. French is one of the most frequently
studied foreign languages in European schools and many studies have been car-
ried out on learners with French as target language and a variety of L1s. In France,
research on L2 French in recent decades has been a continuation of the seminal
work of Klein and Perdue, initiated during the 1980s. Outside France, important
work has been carried out for instance in the United Kingdom and in Flanders,
where French is a frequently studied school subject. Also in Sweden, French has
for a long time been an important foreign language and research on the acqui-
sition of French has a longstanding tradition. In 1988, inspired by the work of
Perdue and colleagues in Paris within the ESF project, Inge Bartning started to
collect data from Swedish learners of French at Stockholm University. This proj-
ect (InterFra) has grown continuously and now provides data from informants
ranging from beginning learners to very advanced L2 users of French, which has
made it possible to describe the different developmental stages that the learners go
through when acquiring French as a L2. Klein & Perdue (1997) proposed the ba-
sic variety and, relating her work to their ideas about interlanguage development,
Bartning (1997) presented an overview of research on the advanced L2 learner.
Furthermore, Bartning and Schlyter (2004) identified a scale of developmental
stages — from the initial stage to the advanced high stage — for Swedes’ develop-
ment of morphological and syntactic knowledge in French L2.
All of the contributions in this volume deal with the acquisition of French
from different perspectives.1 The authors are specialized in L2 research, and more
1. Several of the studies reported in this volume were presented at a colloquium entitled French
Second Language Acquisition, which took place in March 2010 at Stockholm University in hon-
our of Inge Bartning at the time of her retirement. Most of these are based on the InterFra corpus
which will soon be accessible on-line.
2 Camilla Bardel and Christina Lindqvist
particularly in L2 French. Their research interests include morpho-syntax, for-
mulaic language and lexis, and range from formal to functional perspectives on
L2 acquisition. The different studies in the volume take into account several dif-
ferent L1s and cover the whole continuum of the acquisition process, from begin-
ners to very advanced, supposedly near-native, L2 users of French. Together they
represent a diversity of theoretical perspectives and bring together senior as well
as younger researchers, all aiming at a better understanding of the acquisition of
French as L2. It is our hope that this volume will be of interest for students and
teachers, as well as researchers of French as L2 and SLA researchers in general.
In the first chapter of the volume, Inge Bartning presents a survey of the re-
search at Stockholm University during the past 20 years. The first part of her paper
is a detailed description of the corpus used in her research and in most papers
included in this volume (InterFra corpus, see Note 1). The second part concerns
the most recent results within the research program High-level proficiency in sec-
ond language use. Victorine Hancock examines the pragmaticalisation of certain
temporal adverbs, i.e. the development of their different temporal and pragmatic
functions in information structure, among highly advanced L2 speakers of French.
Hugues Engel then investigates the use and development of dislocations in the
oral production of Swedish learners of French, ranging from beginners to L2 us-
ers who have spent many years in France. Two main kinds of dislocations are
analysed: [moi je VP] and its syntactical variants, and dislocations referring to
third entities such as [NP il VP] and [NP c’est X]. Fanny Forsberg Lundell and
Christina Lindqvist contribute to the characterization of the advanced learner of
French by examining the acquisition of vocabulary and formulaic sequences. This
study gives new insights into what is known about the development of Swedish
learners of L2 French, which has mainly focused on morpho-syntax in the past.
Moving then to another setting for the acquisition of French as L2, Richard Towell
discusses the acquisition of French by Anglophone learners in Great Britain, fo-
cussing on their morpho-syntactic development as well as on the role of formulaic
language in L2 French. The chapter illustrates how the model in Towell & Hawkins
(1994) can be applied, considering the variety of knowledge sources relied upon
in L2 acquisition and the processing demands that consequently distinguish L2
from L1 acquisition. In the next chapter, Daniel Véronique aims at identifying the
factors that explain the sequence of acquisition and use of additive scope particles
(aussi, même and encore, i.e. ‘also’, ‘even’ and ‘still’) in L2 French by L1 speakers of
Moroccan Arabic in France. Investigating the syntactic and semantic differences
affecting scope particles in Moroccan Arabic and French, he also brings up other
factors such as cognitive saliency and semantic complexity in addition to informa-
tion structure and finiteness. Finally, Jonas Granfeldt analyzes the development of
object clitics and the process of cliticisation in French, comparing child L2 learners
The acquisition of French as a second language 3
with different ages of onset to both simultaneous bilingual children and monolin-
gual controls. He discusses the results in relation to the Critical Period Hypothesis.
The aim of this synthesis of L2 French in different settings, from learners of
different L1s and of varying age, is to give a picture of research on the topic cur-
rently ongoing in Sweden as well as in some other European countries.