Research on linguistic diversity has revived a number of debates concerning universal and language-specific determinants in language acquisition. The present paper addresses some of these questions in relation to the expression of caused motion. In this domain languages fall into two typologically different families (Talmy, 2000), in which 1) Manner/Cause are typically encoded in verbal roots and Path in satellites (to walk, hop, skip… roll the ball… across, up, down…), or 2) Path is expressed in main verbs and information generally encoded in less compact constructions (traverser en courant ‘to run across’, traverser en faisant-rouler ‘to go across by making-roll’).   We will examine the implications of this typological contrast for second language acquisition. Several groups of adult speakers (English native speakers, French native speakers - and English learners of French at three proficiency levels) were asked to describe animated cartoons in which an agent acted upon an object in a certain Manner causing its displacement according to a certain Manner and Path (e.g., push a ball so that it rolls down a hill). At lower proficiency levels some of the learners’ responses relied on Path verbs, but did not explicitly express all of the information (e.g., intransitive entrer ‘enter’). Other responses relied on Manner verbs with satellites that unsuccessfully attempted to indicate location changes (e.g., marcher/pousser dans ‘to walk/push in’, marcher à travers ‘to walk across’). With increasing proficiency speakers used more complex constructions, but whereas French natives expressed Path in main verbs and Manner in gerunds (e.g., monter en poussant ‘to ascend pushing’), learners frequently did the reverse (e.g. pousser en montant ‘to push ascending’). Regardless of proficiency, many responses clearly had a non-native flavour, despite the fact that they were not ungrammatical. Such results constitute a real challenge for language teachers. More generally, the discussion highlights the implications of typological constraints for models of second language acquisition and teaching.

The online segmentation of a continuous speech stream requires that the listener employ strategies to identify word and syllable boundaries.  Much cross-linguistic research has been undertaken on the acoustic cues that are present in the speech stream that allow listeners to locate word boundaries and disambiguate ambiguous input.  (See for example, Nakatani and Dukes, 1977; Quené, 1992) In spoken French, the phonological processes of liaison, elision, and enchaînement often render syllable and word boundaries ambiguous (e.g. un air ‘a melody’ and un nerf ‘a nerve’, both transcribed and syllabified in the same manner).  Some research has suggested that in the case of liaison speakers of French give listeners acoustic cues to word boundaries, and thus segmentation, through durational variation of pivotal consonants.  Using a lexical decision task in French, Spinelli, McQueen, and Cutler (2003) tested whether phrases rendered ambiguous by liaison hindered lexical access.  In this study, reaction time was measured and recognition of vowel-initial words was not slowed due to resyllabification. The words oignon ‘onion’ and rognon ‘kidney’ were both recognized with equal speed in the phrases le dernier oignon ‘the last onion’ and le dernier rognon ‘the last kidney’ though these phrases have ambiguous phonemic content. Spinelli et al. suggested that there must be enough acoustic differentiation between liaison consonants and initial consonants to allow for vowel-initial words to be activated pre-lexically in the word recognition process.  The results of the Spinelli et al. study suggest that these sub-phonemic differences are not sufficiently robust to cancel out competing candidates, but that they are robust enough to “bias interpretation in the correct direction” (2003, p. 250).  The authors hypothesize that listeners exploit “subtle but reliable” acoustic cues in French to mark word boundaries and that access to representations in the mental lexicon is facilitated by these cues (2003, p. 248). The current study directly tested this hypothesis by employing a forced-choice identification task in which both native speakers of French and late learners of French as a second language (L2) were asked to differentiate phrases containing ambiguous phonemic content.  Phrases rendered ambiguous by liaison were presented aurally to 15 native speakers of French and 15 late learners.  Participants were then asked to indicate what they had just heard by choosing one of two phrases presented visually on a computer screen.  The results suggest that, though durational differences may be systematically present in the acoustic signal and may allow for the activation of vowel-initial candidates in the word recognition process, these durational differences are not robust enough to systematically guide listeners in disambiguation. Factors involved in top-down processing such as frequency and plausibility were also taken into consideration, but these factors did not play a systematic role in the differentiation of ambiguous phonemic content either.   However, of particular interest for the study of L2 learning is the fact that, though neither participant group performed significantly above chance on the identification task, the two groups did perform similarly as to the directionality of the distribution of their responses.  Though overall mean percent correct for both groups was roughly at chance, there were significant biases in most stimulus pairs for both participant groups.  Even more striking is the fact that the non-native speakers showed many biases in the same direction as those of the native speaker group.   In 10 out of 12 minimal pairs tested the non-native speaker group preferred the same token as the native speakers, which would suggest that the late learners are to some extent behaving like native speakers in this perceptual task.

In this paper, we address two topics relevant to the study of non-native language learning in adults. In Part I, we compare and contrast the patterns of dynamic learning behavior that have been reported in studies of vocabulary acquisition across orthographically different L1s. In Part 2, we examine the methodologies that have been used to analyze novel word learning across orthographies. We then introduce a non-extensive neural network model of non-native word learning that provides accurate estimates of dynamic learning processes and an algorithm that tracks the dynamic changes in vocabulary acquisition on a trial-by-trial basis. The model can successfully be used as a sensitive tool for diagnosing efficient vs. inefficient strategic learning behavior. It explains how the learning time depends on the amount of the to-be-learned information and the efficiency (or inefficiency) of a given learning strategy. The model can also be used to predict both group and individual performance. On the basis of our empirical and modeling results, we analyze what types of strategies are most effective in non-native word learning for learners with orthographically different L1s. Future challenges for our model and its application to the study of other levels of second language learning (e.g. syntax or semantics) are discussed.

There has been renewed interest in the multi-faceted phenomenon of conversion in English, the process by which a word changes its class without any change in form (e.g.  The student Googled the professor; he compressed the computer file by zipping it; I’ll foot the bill). Conversion frequency is quite high in English compared to many other languages. However, to date, there has been an almost total lack of research looking into how adults from linguistically diverse environments understand and use converted forms. Learner awareness and production of conversion in the interlanguage progression toward near-native competence involve interesting lexical, contextual, cultural, and pedagogical factors. This study's aim is to improve the awareness and pedagogical potential of conversion with the outcome that it is understood, taught, and produced more competently and efficiently. We chose to explore the "conversion competence" of adult French L1 near-native speakers of L2 English; the results show that the French L1 informants used more than one strategy to deduce the meanings of converted words: co-text and context, cross cultural knowledge, and extralinguistic creativity.

Dans cette communication, je montrerai comment pourrait-on mettre à profit de l’enseignement des langues étrangères certains résultats de la recherche en acquisition des langues secondes (AL2). A travers l’analyse de l’appropriation en L2 de la référence spatiale, je discute quatre points intéressants permettant  d’établir un lien entre la recherche et l’enseignement. Premièrement, des travaux en AL2 proposent une description d’un système linguistique différente et complémentaire par rapport à la description fournie par d’autres approches linguistiques. En analysant la langue de l’apprenant on apporte une nouvelle perspective quant au fonctionnement du système linguistique de la langue à apprendre (de la langue cible). Deuxièmement, les études en AL2 permettent de mener une comparaison d’au moins deux systèmes linguistiques puisqu’en analysant des productions d’un apprenant on compare sa langue maternelle étant souvent mais pas uniquement à l’origine de ses productions en L2. Troisièmement, les travaux en AL2 auxquels je fais référence se basent sur de données textuelles c’est-à-dire que l’on analyse comment différents types des discours (description, récits, instructions etc.) sont construits en L2. L’enseignement des L2 ne se limite pas à l’apprentissage d’un code linguistique. On enseigne également comment construire un discours approprié à la situation et au but de la communication.  Il est donc intéressant de savoir quels sont les phénomènes acquisitionnels concernant l’appropriation des procédés discursifs nécessaires à la construction d’un discours en L2. Et pour finir, je voudrais souligner l’intérêt de la comparaison de l’acquisition des L2 par des apprenants adultes avec l’acquisition de la langue maternelle par des enfants. La comparaison de ces deux types de productions permet de montrer plus clairement quelles sont les tâches acquisitionnelles des apprenants adultes et sur quoi ils peuvent s’appuyer pour s’approprier une nouvelle langue.

In the ACT* and ACT-R models of skill acquisition – oft-cited, and quite useful in any consideration of the cognitive and linguistic aspects of the development of communication skill in a foreign language – expertise is seen as the result of “proceduralizing” declarative knowledge (Anderson 1982, 1996, 2000; see also Masson 1990). Anderson’s proceduralization process certainly fits with models of L2 acquisition that attribute increased fluency to a speed-up resulting from the automatization of processes which had previously required attentional control (McLaughlin & Heredia 1996), to various “chunking” phenomena (Ellis 1996, 2003), or to the implicit “tuning” of an explicitly-encountered language system (Ellis 2005). Despite the fundamental nature of these concepts, relatively little research has attempted to identify how proceduralization of knowledge about the L2 comes about, or even what exactly is declarative, and what is procedural in L2 communication skill. Recent research is beginning to define these issues more rigorously (Ullman 2001; Segalowitz & Hulstijn 2003; Ellis 2006), but further clarification is certainly needed. Examination of a spoken learner corpus being compiled at the Université de Savoie (productions in three European languages by learners of various origins) reveals interesting differences in the hesitation phenomena associated with various gaps in L2 knowledge. The most radical breakdowns in oral fluency in our corpus are systematically associated with lexical search – the mental lexicon being, of course, the quintessential example of declarative knowledge in long-term memory (Ullman et al. 1997). Errors or gaps in more procedural aspects of L2 production (producing the correct inflections, putting words together in phrases, articulating foreign sound sequences) tend to produce far less pausing, despite morphological and syntactic differences between the languages of the project (English, French, and Italian). Even at a very low level of L2 competence, subjects seem to have developed their own semi-automatized procedures for generating grammatical forms, and L1 automatisms seem to govern syntactic procedures. Significant differences in hesitation phenomena for advanced and less-advanced speakers will be illustrated, and implications for models of L2 acquisition and language teaching methodology will be briefly outlined.

La notion de représentation est aujourd’hui de plus en plus présente dans les études portant sur les langues, leur appropriation et leur transmission. Cette contribution vise à analyser les conditions dans lesquelles les représentations, qu’elles soient relatives aux langues, aux systèmes linguistiques ou aux statuts attribués aux langues, influencent les stratégies mises en oeuvre par les apprenants dans l’apprentissage des langues. Une attention particulière sera accordée aux représentations des apprenants de la compétence plurilingue, à leurs attitudes et à leurs motivations d’apprentissage. Suivant notre hypothèse, les représentations sont liées à la biographie langagière des apprenants, aux pratiques discursives et aux processus de mise en mots, qu’elles deviennent objet de discours et sont ainsi sujettes à de fortes variations et/ou à de constantes négociations. Les représentations sur la langue maternelle, sur la langue à apprendre et sur leurs différences sont liées à certaines stratégies d’apprentissage chez les apprenants qui se construisent une représentation de la distance interlinguistique séparant le système de leur langue maternelle de celui de la langue à apprendre. Nous considérons que les apprenants plurilingues se forgent des représentations des liens entre les langues, des systèmes linguistiques, de leurs fonctionnements respectifs, de leurs probables ressemblances ou différences et des relations qu’ils peuvent entretenir, et que ces représentations entretiennent des liens forts avec les processus d’apprentissage, qu’elles contribuent à leur tour à fortifier ou à ralentir. - Comment peut-on identifier et décrire les représentations des langues et de leur apprentissage chez des apprenants plurilingues ? - Comment certaines représentations aident-elles les apprenants à construire une compétence plurilingue dont la dynamique se manifeste à travers l’alternance de langues ? Pour répondre à ces questionnements, nous analyserons des données orales recueillies auprès des élèves franco-allemands scolarisés dans un établissement bilingue, tel que le lycée de Fribourg.

The presentation will focus on the second-year college (intermediate) language course and its potential of preparing lower-division students for upper division courses. Students in this intermediate course are likely to have language skills at the Intermediate Low to Mid range and to face tasks at the Advanced if not Superior range. How do we help them bridge this language gap without sacrificing content, at the same time as guiding their progress to these higher levels of proficiency needed in lower- and upper-division courses which integrate literature? The session will examine a number of ways to approach this situation. It will demonstrate why literature is ideal for this development.   Outline: - Characteristics of students  with Intermediate and Advanced level proficiency: language functions in search of control! - Text Selection: what research tells us about primary and secondary ease factors (schemata, signaling, etc.) - Pre-Reading Activities: scaffolding through skimming, scanning etc. - Setting the tasks post-reading from comprehension to interpretation: how do we engage our students analytically, affectively and linguistically?

Organiser et conduire des cours de FLE destinés à des adultes en situation professionnelle demande une démarche spécifique. Cela est d’autant plus vrai dans un cadre spécifique qui est celui des entreprises multinationales. Les collaborateurs expatriés venant en France des pays culturellement et linguistiquement différents présentent des besoins aussi différents que variés. L’enseignant doit répondre à ces besoins réels en adoptant la démarche pédagogique à l’origine linguistique et culturelle de l’apprenant, à son niveau, au crédit d’heures dont il dispose, ainsi qu’au rythme de sa formation, tout en sachant que les obligations professionnelles sont prioritaires (irrégularité des cours, annulations). Ainsi, il n’existe pratiquement aucune méthode que l’on pourrait suivre entièrement. Les cours s’appuient sur des extraits de méthodes et souvent sur des documents authentiques internes, même au niveau débutant, afin d’assurer un apprentissage rapide et efficace de la langue. De plus, il s’agit le plus souvent de cours particuliers et l’enseignant, tout en jouant la fonction d’organisateur, d’animateur, de personne-ressource, d’acteur, etc. doit savoir faire face à l’immédiateté de la demande de la part de l’apprenant. Ces réflexions nées de ma double expérience d’enseignante de FLE et de formatrice de professeurs de langues tentent de faire un lien entre la pratique de l’enseignement en entreprise et les discours théorisants qui ne prennent pas suffisamment en compte cette situation spécifique d’enseignement. Il s’agit de rapprocher la théorie de la pratique et de ses principes méthodologiques sous-jacents. A apprenant différent, solution didactique différente, surtout en entreprise!

Learning to write in one’s first language is a difficult activity and an ongoing process that entails several specific activities --i.e., planning, revising, rewriting, etc.-- while putting ideas together on paper (Hillocks 1995; Elbow 2000). However, this activity is even more difficult when someone has to write in a language which is different from the one spoken at home. In fact, this is the situation that is faced by many Spanish/English bilingual students in the United States and in Mexico, who are commonly required to write in both languages. In the case of the United States, even though the emphasis on writing instruction has been a main concern in the teaching of Spanish to bilingual students, it is an area in which very few theoretical advances have been made (Valdés 1995 and 1997; Colombi 2003; Martínez 2004; Spicer-Escalante 2002 and 2005). A similar situation is encountered in Mexico, although writing is now considered an essential component of the national education plan (Secretaría de Educación Pública 2001). Based on classroom observations, on the collection of both class syllabi and study programs, and on the collection of students’ written essays, this presentation seeks to describe the current state of affairs regarding Spanish and English writing instruction at the high school level in both countries. The main objectives of this presentation are: 1) the analysis and comparison of the diverse teaching methodologies that High School teachers, in the U.S. and in Mexico, use to teach Spanish and English writing, and 2) the analysis of the effects that the specific observed writing instruction has on the students’ writing tasks.

The presentation will report on the study whose aim was the exploration and comparison of textual metadiscourse resources employed by advanced learners of English with different L1 backgrounds (French, Spanish, Swedish, German, Russian, Polish and Finnish) as well as by native professional and novice writers. The analysis will focus on the differences in the use of cohesive devices, specifically connectors. The study is set within the framework of contrastive rhetoric whose claims can be summarised as follows:   Contrastive rhetoric maintains that language and writing are cultural phenomena. As a direct consequence, each language has rhetorical conventions unique to it.” (Connor 1996:5)   These conventions pertain to such factors as the structure or units of texts, information structure, the use of metadiscourse or intertextuality. When writing in a foreign language learners show a tendency to transfer not only the linguistic features of their native tongue but also its rhetorical conventions. As a result, native speakers of a language may find learners’ written discourse ineffective or even incomprehensible. Corpora have recently become an important source of data in the field of contrastive rhetoric. For the purposes of the study the data were drawn form three corpora: the ICLE (International Corpus of Learner English), LOCNESS (a corpus of essays produced by British and American university students) and the FLOB Corpus containing samples of British published texts. The results of the study revealed major discrepancies in the use of connectors by different groups of foreign language learners and native writers. The wide range of data used in the analysis helped to tease apart the multiple factors influencing the use of connectors by advanced L2 learners such as L1 transfer, L2 instruction or the lack of expertise in writing. The pedagogical implications of the study will be discussed.

De nos jours il est accepté, dans la recherche sur l´acquisition d´une langue, que le processus cognitif haut-bas connu sous le nom de schéma textuel intervient d´une manière décisive sur la compréhension écrite des textes ; autrement dit, la compréhension est fondée sur la reconnaissance des types textuels conventionnels (narration, explication, description, argumentation). Cette théorie semble bien établie pour l´acquisition de la langue maternelle, mais les processus cognitifs reliés à la compréhension des types textuels ne sont pas si clairs quand il s´agit de l´acquisition d´une langue étrangère. Notre communication a pour objet d´ étudier l´influence de la typologie textuelle dans la compréhension écrite du Français Langue Étrangère, à la lumière de la recherche récente (Gaonac´h, 2003, Fayol, 2003, Adam, 2005), en mesurant en quoi les schémas textuels constituent des outils cognitifs qui agissent sur la compréhension des textes en Français Langue Étrangère, et quels processus cognitifs sont activés dans la compréhension des textes argumentatifs. Pour cela nous avons réalisé une investigation expérimentale sur la compréhension de textes argumentatifs auprès d´étudiants adolescents et adultes hispanophones de Français Langue Étrangère de niveau intermédiaire. Notre étude montre que l´identification du type textuel argumentatif favorise la compréhension textuelle; qu´un schéma textuel prototypique est rétabli quand ce schéma n´est pas identifié dans le « input » offert ; que le schéma textuel peut avoir une plus grande relevance dans la compréhension que le « input » linguistique. Finalement, on examine les conséquences de cette question pour les méthodologies de l´enseignement/apprentissage de la compréhension écrite en Français Langue Étrangère.

This investigation was an attempt to evaluate the validity of Strategy Schema (Casanave, 1988) via Language Ceiling Hypothesis (Clarke, 1980) for the first time. The purpose was to discover if the activation of strategy schema has equal effect on the reading comprehension ability of the learners at different levels of language proficiency. To this end, 286 learners of English as a foreign language participated in an experimental research namely; pre-test post-test equivalent groups design. The learners were put into three groups of good readers, average readers, and poor readers. They took a proficiency test as pre-test to be homogenized and after the treatment, that is the activation of strategy schema, took a reading comprehension test with six reading comprehension passages with the same readability indexes of the pre-test. The results of pre-test post-test comparison analyzed via the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) illustrated that the activation of the strategy schema is effective for the good and average readers, but ineffective for the poor readers. This discovery is a negative evidence for Strategy Schema Hypothesis which could be only explained through Short-Circus Hypothesis. One can conclude that poor readers’ limited control over English language short circuits their reading ability.

Depuis les travaux de R. B. Kaplan, la rhétorique contrastive s’emploie à souligner que les pratiques textuelles variant d’un pays à l’autre, il convient d’en tenir compte en didactique de l’écrit. En ce qui concerne les écrits en français, les travaux – bien que peu nombreux – montrent que les variations avec la manière de rédiger d’autres pays, se situent à différents niveaux : rhétorique, textuel et énonciatif. Il serait donc intéressant d’observer comment des apprenants allophones d’origines très diverses parviennent à s’approprier les traditions rhétoriques françaises. Pour ce faire, on a recueilli et analysé des copies rédigées par des étrangers ayant participé, à Paris, à un cours sur l’argumentation écrite en français langue étrangère : ces apprenants se caractérisent par une grande diversité culturelle et linguistique puisqu’ils proviennent de huit pays et de trois continents différents (Europe, Amérique et Asie). Dans cette communication, on présentera une partie des résultats de l’analyse longitudinale des pratiques d’écriture de ces apprenants : on montrera que si certains d’entre eux modifient grandement leurs stratégies au long du cours, ce n’est pas le cas de tous et on cherchera à s’interroger sur les raisons de ces différences.

As barriers of time and space have been reduced, the multilingual, multicultural classroom has become a fixture at many universities; students from around the world routinely form international learning communities at institutions like the American University of Paris to study French and the University of Hawai‘i to study English. Such learning environments present rich opportunities to language pedagogues and researchers. Technological innovations have further enriched these international learning environments as the physical boundaries of the traditional classroom have been transcended and hybrid communities of practice have been created.    “Communities of practice” refers to the social learning groups that form when people have a common interest and collaborate over time. In a technological sense, “hybrid learning” refers to distance learning in combination with traditional classroom-based instruction wherein students in different locations create a virtual community that is independent of time and place. In another sense, hybrid international communities create perfect environments for a comparative pedagogical approach that invites learners to observe, compare and analyze material from their respective cultural perspectives. This presentation will give an overview of hybrid learning models, discuss methodological and practical considerations for implementation, and share experiences from an ongoing hybrid learning project between the University of Paris XI and the University of Hawai‘i.