Some Reflections on Reference in the Teaching of French as a Foreign Language Context

Abstract

Grammatical and lexical cohesion are necessary conditions to guarantee a text’s coherence (Halliday and Hasan 1976). Grammatical cohesion is classified into four types of relation: reference, conjunction, substitution, and ellipsis. This study aims to investigate the use of the cohesive device of reference in written discourse produced by users/learners of French as a foreign language, to explore the kind of references they prefer and to highlight the difficulties they come across. Our study is based on a learner corpus composed of written productions of Greek-speaking users/learners of French who participated in National Foreign Language Exam System (Κρατικό Πιστοποιητικό Γλωσσομάθειας, ΚΠΓ). We used a sample of texts produced by candidates who participated in the examination willing to be certified at the levels B (Independent user) and C (Proficient user) of language proficiency according to the 6-level scale of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe 2001).

Creation of an electronic learner corpus of French as a foreign language

“…The study of the communicative skills that learners developed, as well as the detection, identification, and classification of language errors in relation to their language skills, such as syntax, vocabulary and spelling, may lead to important research results for the benefit of the students of every level of language proficiency. The feedback that can be derived from the comparative study on the differences in terms of the type and frequency of error production resulting from basic, independent, and proficient users of the language (Council of Europe 2001, 2020) is another possibility of similar character (Tsaknaki 2020(Tsaknaki , 2022.…”