Temporal reference in oral narratives produced by French learners of English as a second language

Abstract

The differing approaches to expressing temporality across languages lead us to question what difficulties might be experienced by learners of a second language when referring to time. We examine the spoken data of 33 French university learners of English to assess their mastery of the English system of temporal reference, especially the case of and, a discourse marker which may seem easy to acquire. We find that the subtleties of and are still to be acquired by even relatively advanced learners. Our participants do not use and in the way the native English speakers do, but as its French equivalent et. Conversely, the native English speakers also use and to structure their speech, a value that our French participants have not acquired.