Research project:
Textual Competence in French as a Foreign Language (FFL):
(How) Do learners create coherent and cohesive argumentative texts ?
Annemie Demol
Ghent University
Belgium
1. Aim
My project aims at a detailed analysis of the ways in which Flemish FFL learners write
coherent and cohesive argumentative texts (French dissertations), with a particular emphasis
on the role connectors might play. It is my intention to compare the connectors used by these
learners to those used by Flemish and Francophone native speakers in similar writing.
2. Background
2.1 Connectors in SLA
Some studies (see among others Connor 1984, Hancock 1997, Hinkel 2000, Kerr-Barnes
1998) have concluded that learner language shows an overuse of some connectors, an
underuse of others and a "misuse" or "proper use" of still others. Learner productions also
present a significantly smaller range of connectors than productions of native speakers of the
target language. However, most of these studies do not attempt to provide an explanation for
these observations. I feel that it is crucial, in order to achieve this, to take into consideration
the mental model that the learner develops of the text. More especially, it is worth verifying to
what extent (s)he is capable of taking into account the mental model of the reader during the
writing process. Therefore, it is necessary to study learner writing with respect to the
cognitive processes that are ongoing in the mind of the learner.
2.2 The influence of language-specific properties on the conceptualisation, selection and
organisation of information.
Research (see among others Dimroth & Starren 2003) has revealed that even advanced learner
language differs in a rather subtle way from native speaker language and contains some kind
of "parfum d'étrangeté" (Lambert et al. 2003). This is often due to the fact that the mother
tongue of the learners and the target language present different ways of organizing the
content, which may ultimately lead to or stem from differing ways of conceptualizing and
selecting the content. According to Carroll & Lambert (2003) “the preferred options consist of
uniform clusters of form-function relations, which are clearly supported by grammaticised
features of the languages”. Carroll & von Stutterheim (1997) and Lambert (1997) have
suggested that the choice and use of temporal and causal adverbs (i.e. connectors) in English
and German narrations and instructions on the one hand and in French and English ones on
the other, is influenced by typological and conceptual differences between these languages.
Lamiroy (1994) hypothesizes that logical relations remain far more implicit in Dutch writing
than in French writing, where more connectors are used.
3. Research objectives
3.1 Brief description and motivation
My decision to study connectors in written argumentative texts is based on the observation
that most of the studies quoted in section 2 are interested in oral productions. Moreover,
argumentative texts have not always received as much attention as narrations, descriptions or
instructions, especially when FFL is considered, even though they play an important role in
language instruction.
It will be interesting to compare the results of this project to those obtained in earlier studies
(cf. 2.1 and 2.2). This will allow me, to a certain extent, to verify the impact of the genre and
the register on textual cohesion. Von Stutterheim & Klein, for instance, claim that various
discourse-related features (e.g. anaphora, information structure) are dependent on the text
type. Second, it is my intention to go beyond pure descriptive linguistics by trying to
formulate and test hypotheses as to why learner productions are characterized by phenomena
such as overuse, underuse, misuse and little (lexical) variation. Third, a detailed description of
the way logical relations are expressed in Dutch, French and FFL might shed some light on
the role connectors play in the organisation and conceptualisation of the information in
argumentative writing in these languages.
3.2 Research questions and hypotheses
Hypothesis 1: There are quantitative and qualitative differences between the mother tongue of
the learners and their target language which complicate the acquisition of connectors. The
transfer of rhetorical strategies, especially of the way in which (logical) relations between
phenomena, ideas, events and entities are conceived is (partly ?) responsible for the
differences between the interlanguage and the target language. This hypothesis seems
contrary to the following one.
Hypothesis 2: The problems that occur in the FFL-writing of Flemish learners aren’t different
from the ones other FFL-learners experience: they are part of the acquisition process. They
could be related, among other things, to the cognitive complexity of the writing task. Contrary
to mother tongue speakers, learners not only have to focus their attention on the content,
planning and logical structure of their text, they also need to make grammar and lexical
decisions, which are much less automatic than in the case of native speakers. This could very
well result in the fact that they don’t sufficiently take the mental model of the reader into
consideration (cf. Odell 1983).
Hypothesis 3: The way in which cohesion and coherence is established and the role
connectors play in this (cf. kinds, frequency) also depends on the text genre. This is a factor
that complicates the acquisition of connectors and cohesive devices.
The impact of all of these factors needs to be examined as closely as possible. Testing
hypothesis 1 therefore also entails the need to verify what role connectors play within the total
range of cohesive devices. Let’s assume that Dutch argumentative texts contain less
connectors that French ones: does this mean that other devices are used, such as causal verbs
or nouns expressing logical relations ? The proportions of these means also take up an
important place in hypothesis 3: do learners differentiate cohesive devices according to the
genres or do they develop some “passe-partout” solutions ?
4. Methodology
A corpus-driven study should reveal which logical functions are most interesting to work on.
A (longitudinal) learner corpus of argumentative texts will be collected at Ghent University
(starting from October 2007) and will be compared to similar native speaker corpora and
reference corpora (editorials).
Comments or questions may be sent to:
annemie.demol@ugent.be
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