scholarly journals Gender Errors in French Interlanguage

Author(s):  
Jean-Marc Dewaele

Many studies on gender assignment in French have focused on the effect of the final morpheme of the noun on the identification of the gender of the noun and the subsequent agreement with any determiners. The present study considers the effect of a noun’s initial vowel on gender accuracy in conversations with 36 Dutch-speaking French foreign language learners. The analysis of 1540 indefinite article + noun sequences revealed that gender accuracy was significantly lower when the noun started with a vowel. This effect was significant for French L3 learners but weaker among more advanced French L2 learners. It thus seems that an initial vowel, and the resulting gender syncretism, delays the correct identification of a noun’s gender among French L2 learners.

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-71
Author(s):  
Višnja Pavičić Takač ◽  
Sanja Vakanjac Ivezić

Academic literacy includes the learners’ ability to use their language knowledge to form articulate texts. In communicative competence models this ability is subsumed under the notion of discourse competence which includes the concepts of cohesion and coherence. Starting from the premise that constructing a coherent text entails efficient use of metadiscourse (i.e. means of explicit text organisation) this study focuses on elements referring to discourse acts, text sequences or stages called frame markers, i.e. items providing framing information about elements of the discourse and functioning to sequence, label, predict and shift arguments, making the discourse clear to readers or listeners (Hyland 2005). It analyses patterns of L2 learners’ use of frame markers, compares them to English native speakers’, and explores the relationship between frame markers and coherence. The corpus includes 80 argumentative essays written by early undergraduate Croatian L2 learners of English at B2 level. The results indicate that foreign language learners’ argumentative essays are characterized by an overuse of a limited set of frame markers. Finally, implications are drawn for teaching and further research.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 219-242
Author(s):  
Annalisa Baicchi ◽  
Paolo Della Putta

Abstract This article reports empirical evidence of constructional priming effects in L2 learners of English and Italian. The well-known pioneering experiment carried out by Bencini and Goldberg (2000) with L1 speakers of English paved the way for our investigation. We employed the same protocol to ascertain whether constructions have an ontological status also in the mind of L2 learners. We conducted experiments with four groups of learners whose language proficiency levels correspond to the B1 and B2 levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). The results we obtained in our cross-linguistic experiments demonstrate that learners are reliant on constructional templates when they are required to produce linguistic generalizations.


Author(s):  
Xuyan Qiu ◽  
Hong Cheng

Abstract In task-based language teaching, various types of tasks are developed from different scenarios in daily communication. Different kinds of tasks encourage oral production of different generic features and can impose different degrees of information-processing pressure on second language (L2) learners. Therefore, the functions and nature of task types are worth considering when designing tasks. Although the effects of task types on L2 oral output have been explored in the current literature, L2 learners’ engagement in different types of tasks is relatively under-explored. Since engaging L2 learners in task performance can facilitate L2 learning, it is important for us to attend to learner engagement in task-based research. This study investigated the effects of two types of tasks, opinion-exchange tasks and storytelling tasks, on the oral performance of 20 English as a foreign language learners in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency and their engagement in L2 use. They performed two opinion-exchange tasks and two storytelling tasks. The analysis of their oral discourse revealed that the learners spent longer time, had more turn-taking, and more frequently negotiated language-related issues when co-constructing stories than in opinion-exchange tasks. The results reinforce the importance of considering task types in teaching L2 speaking.


2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 115-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Euen Hyuk Sarah Jung ◽  
Kim, Young Jae

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Moh. Rofid Fikroni

Bearing in mind that the learners’ speaking skill had become the main goal in learning language, grammatical competence is believed to have a big role within foreign language learners’ language production, especially in spoken form. Moreover, the learners’ grammatical competence is also closely related to the Monitor Hypothesis proposed by Krashen (1982) in which it says that the acquired system will function as monitor or editor to the language production. The students’ monitor performance will vary based on how they make use of their acquired system. They may use it optimally (monitor optimal user), overly (monitor over-user), or they may not use it at all (monitor under-user). Therefore, learners’ grammatical competence has its own role, which is very crucial, within learners’ language production, which is not only to produce the language, but also to monitor the language production itself. Because of this reason, focus on form instruction will give a great impact for students’ grammatical competence within their communicative competence. This paper aims to present ideas about the how crucial the role grammatical competence within learners’ L2 communication.


2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabine De Knop ◽  
Julien Perrez

The article deals with the typological differences between the Romance language French and the Germanic languages German and Dutch for the linguistic expressions of posture and location. It describes how these typological differences can be problematic for French-speaking learners of German and Dutch. The main difference between both types of languages is that posture and location tend to be encoded by posture verbs in Germanic languages and by very general verbs in Romance languages (Talmy 2000). After a detailed description of the semantic networks of the German and Dutch posture verbs, the paper takes a critical look at how these expressions are dealt with in teaching manuals. It further presents strategies for the efficient teaching of posture verbs to foreign language learners. These strategies are among others awareness-raising exercises about the compulsory use of posture verbs in Germanic languages and the description of conceptual metaphors in different languages. These pedagogical avenues for the efficient teaching of the Dutch and German posture verbs constitute a first step towards the elaboration of an experimental set-up aiming at verifying them.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1455332
Author(s):  
Mohammad Javad Riasati ◽  
Yvonne Xian-han Huang

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