Resources and obstacles in very advanced L2 French

Abstract

This study builds on the proposition that there are six developmental stages for spoken L2 French, based on morpho-syntactic criteria (Bartning and Schlyter 2004). In order to investigate developmental stages 'beyond stage 6' , oral productions of several groups of advanced learners/users and native speakers are analyzed in terms of resources and obstacles. Among the resources, we investigate expected late features such as formulaic language and elaboration of information structure (Forsberg 2008;Hancock 2007). Morpho-syntactic deviances (MSDs), i.e. obstacles are also investigated. MSDs are expected to be almost absent beyond stage 6 (von Stutterheim 2003). Surprisingly, they continue to be present even at these very high levels. The results also show that formulaic language and information structure are promising measures of high levels, although the latter did not yield significant differences compared to lower stages. The study concludes with the proposal of a transitional stage with L2 users called functional bilinguals, which would constitute a stage between the advanced learner and the near-native speaker.

Collocation in beginner learner writing: A longitudinal study

“…Many of the studies employing this method have focused on learners of L2 English from the same first language (L1) background: Chinese (Chen & Baker, 2010), French (Gilquin, 2007;Granger, 1998;Henderson & Barr, 2010), German (Lorenz, 1999), Hebrew (Laufer & Waldman, 2011;Levitzky-Aviad & Laufer, 2013), Swedish (Bartning, Forsberg, & Hancock, 2009;Forsberg, 2010), and Russian (Siyanova & Schmitt, 2008). Fewer studies have compared the patterns of collocation usage in learners from a number of different L1 backgrounds.…”

“…In another study, Gotz and Schilk (2011) compared three-word lexical bundles in English as a foreign language (EFL) versus English as a second language (ESL) varieties of spoken English. Finally, Bartning et al (2009) and Forsberg (2010) analysed conventional sequences in advanced L2 spoken French e a rare example of the target L2 being non-English.…”

“…Many compared L2 learners of the same mother tongue against an L1 reference corpus, whereas others compared L2 learners of two or even three different L1 backgrounds. In addition, researchers have focussed on a variety of multi-word expressions: Premodifier þ N collocations (Durrant & Schmitt, 2009;Siyanova & Schmitt, 2008), V þ N collocations (Altenberg & Granger, 2001;Cross & Papp, 2008), Intensifier þ Adj collocations (Granger, 1998), lexical bundles (Chen & Baker, 2010;Crossley & Salsbury, 2011), phrasal verbs (Alejo Gonzalez, 2010Waibel, 2008), lexical verbs (Granger & Paquot, 2009), and conventional sequences (Bartning et al, 2009;Forsberg, 2010). Learner corpus studies, however, also differ vastly in the way in which the corpus data were extracted and analysed.…”

“…For example, some have used statistical measures, such as frequency, t-score and mutual information to identify and compare collocations in L2 and L1 corpora (Durrant & Schmitt, 2009;Granger & Bestgen, 2014;Groom, 2009;Lorenz, 1999;Siyanova & Schmitt, 2008); others have employed an automated frequency-driven approach (Chen & Baker, 2010), or a frequency index (Crossley & Salsbury, 2011). A different approach altogether has been to use L1 judgements and collocation dictionaries to evaluate the formulaicity, appropriateness, and correctness of L2 collocations (Bartning et al, 2009;Forsberg, 2010;Howarth, 1996Howarth, , 1998Foster, 2001;Laufer & Waldman, 2011;Nesselhauf, 2005).…”

“…Learners from other L2 backgrounds have been largely disregarded (but see Bartning et al (2009) andForsberg (2010) for corpus-based work on advanced L2 French, and Yuldashev et al (2013) for corpus-based work on advanced L2 Spanish). Given this, the present study aimed to focus on L2 learners of Italian.…”