The missing link in the acquisition of grammatical gender by second language learners of French

Session Submission Type: Paper

Summary

The present study examines the extent to which learners of French as a second language (L2) benefit from various instructional conditions in the acquisition of French grammatical gender. Results show that L2 pronunciation instruction in addition to grammatical instruction is necessary for L2 learners to demonstrate targetlike performance.

Abstract

Previous studies (Harley, 1998; Lyster, 2004; Lyster & Izquierdo, 2009) found that learners of French as a second language (L2) benefit from form-focused instruction (FFI) targeting morphological awareness of noun endings (i.e., sublexical cues) in the acquisition of French grammatical gender. A noteworthy finding from previous studies, however, is that L2 learners developed an interlanguage strategy of pronouncing French determiners in an ambiguous manner as hybrid forms between 'un' and 'une' and between 'le' and 'la'. Thus, the present study hypothesizes that, in order for L2 learners to demonstrate targetlike performance regarding French grammatical gender, FFI targeting pronunciation of the sounds as well as sublexical cues should be implemented in classroom instruction.
To examine the hypothesis, a quasi-experimental study was conducted in intact French L2 classrooms for university-level learners. A total of 6 classrooms (20 learners per classroom) participated in the study. Each of the following instructional conditions was implemented in each classroom (two classrooms per condition) during a total of 6 hours: (a) Instruction on sublexical cues only; (b) instruction targeting sublexical cues and pronunciation; (c) no-FFI. To measure the effects of the instructional conditions on the acquisition of French grammatical gender, a pretest, an immediate posttest, and a delayed posttest were administrated, each of which included grammatical judgment tasks, text-completion tasks, forced-choice identification tasks, reading-aloud tasks, picture-description tasks, and determiner-noun matched/mismatched tasks.
This paper presentation will outline the study’s rationale, design, and results, which as predicted, favored the group receiving FFI on both pronunciation and sublexical clues. We will conclude by highlighting the importance of L2 pronunciation instruction in L2 grammatical acquisition and its interdependence with lexical and morphological domains.

Strand

• Second and Foreign Language Pedagogy (PED)

Presenters

• Andrew Lee, McGill University

• Roy Lyster, McGill University