Search Results (49)

Interest in language-learning motivation has been growing recently, particularly in multilingual contexts where individuals acquire additional languages beyond English. Despite increasing the focus on multilingualism within second-language acquisition (SLA) research, less research focuses on the motivational dynamics of multilingual learners in learning languages other than English (LOTE). Addressing this gap, the present study investigates the complex motivational factors influencing multilingual university students in learning French as an additional language and LOTE within the Belgian context. The participants consisted of 121 multilingual university students who were learning French as an additional language and LOTE. Data were collected through questionnaire and semi-structured interviews, and analyzed using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to provide a comprehensive understanding of learners’ motivational profile. Findings revealed that multilingual learners’ motivation is multifaceted and dynamic, shaped by a combination of intrinsic interests (e.g., cultural appreciation and personal growth), extrinsic goals (e.g., academic and career aspirations), integrative motives, and prior language-learning experiences. The study also sheds light on the overlapping and evolving nature of motivational patterns and provides nuanced insights into LOTE learning motivation within multilingual settings. Full article

Over the past 20 years, researchers have shown increasing interest in social network analysis to understand second language acquisition (SLA), especially in a study abroad (SA) context. To date, few longitudinal studies have examined the joint evolution of the learners’ sociolinguistic competence and socialisation during the SA. By shifting the focus from a global view of the study abroad context to a deep analysis of the composition and structure of each learner’ social networks in the host country, we aim to provide a better understanding of the development of sociolinguistic competence in SLA (Gautier & Chevrot, 2015). We apply the sociological concept of a social network to sociolinguistics. To explore the sociolinguistic competence of 29 learners, we focus on two well-described sociolinguistic variables in French: the optional liaison and the negative ne. We also gathered data on their social networks and provided a deep analysis of each participant’s network. We implemented a quantitative approach to analyse and depict the social networks of the learners. Statistically significant relationships were found between changes in the learners’ personal network and their use of the two sociolinguistic variables. The development of L2-oriented social networks (in terms of size, speaking time, and frequency) over nine months of the SA helps learners to reduce their use of standard variants. Conversely, the development of L1-oriented social networks during the SA is associated with greater use of standard variants. Full article

This study examines the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation in the use of French connectors alors/donc/fait que ‘so’ by two groups of advanced French-as-a-second language (FL2) learners in Ontario: (i) high school French Immersion (FI) students and (ii) university students. It considers two types of functions fulfilled by these connectors: (i) the grammatical function of expressing consequence between two clauses and (ii) a range of discursive functions, a dual focus not present in previous research, which considered only one or the other of these two types of functions. Our study shows that: (i) although these two FL2 groups’ use of the connectors is distant from the norms of FL1 speech, the university students achieve a more advanced level of acquisition of this case of variation than do the FI students, reflecting the positive effect of continued learning of French at the postsecondary level; (ii) ‘level of opportunities to interact in French with native speakers’ has a greater positive impact on the acquisition of alors/donc/fait que than ‘time spent learning French’; and (iii) both groups of students evidence incomplete acquisition of the linguistic constraints of connector choice. Full article

In recent years, several studies across a variety of target languages (e.g., Chinese, French, and Spanish) have demonstrated that students who study abroad acquire target-like patterns of variation. In Spanish-speaking contexts, recent research has moved beyond investigating the acquisition of features specific to Spain to examine that of features used in immersion contexts such as Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Peru, and Argentina. Nevertheless, many of these studies either rely on quantitative variationist analysis or implement qualitative analysis of one or two target dialectal features. In addition, learner omission and expression of pronominal subjects in these contexts have been largely underexplored. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study not only quantitatively examines learners’ production of several features of Buenos Aires Spanish, including sheísmo/zheísmo, /s/-weakening, voseo, and subject pronoun expression, but it also qualitatively relates the production of these features to learners’ experiences during a five-month semester in Argentina. It aims to answer the following research questions: When and to what degree do three English-speaking students studying abroad for five months in Buenos Aires, Argentina acquire target-like production of [ʃ] and/or [ʒ], s-weakening, vos, and subject pronoun expression? How do participants’ experiences, communities of practice, investments, identities, and imagined communities relate to this production? Speech data were gathered prior to, at the midpoint, and at the end of the semester by means of sociolinguistic interviews and elicitation tasks. To further understand the connection between these learners’ use of the target features and their overseas experiences, we explored the case studies of three learners of Spanish of differing proficiency levels (beginning, intermediate, and advanced) using qualitative data collected during semi-structured interviews at each interview time. The results suggest that all three learners increased their production of the prestigious, salient dialectal features of sheísmo/zheísmo and vos during the sojourn and that the amount of increase was greater at each proficiency level. While the beginning and intermediate learners did not move toward target-like norms in their use of the often-stigmatized, less salient, variable features of /s/-weakening and subject pronoun expression, the advanced learner did. As such, stigma, salience, and variability, as well as proficiency level, may play a role in the acquisition of variable features. Learners’ investment in the target language and participation in local communities of practice increased at each proficiency level as well, and learners’ imagined communities beyond their study abroad experiences were related to their identity construction and linguistic choices abroad. Full article

Pedagogical translanguaging (PTL) refers to the use of educational techniques that incorporate learners’ entire linguistic repertoire. Recent studies indicate that PTL is efficient in the teaching of morphological awareness to bilingual children. The question remains whether it can be successfully applied in the highly specific context of adult forced migrants’ classrooms. This study describes a new protocol developed within the framework of PTL to teach derivational morphology to L2 French and Greek adults. We used questionnaires to quantitatively and qualitatively assess the feasibility of the protocol, teachers’ and learners’ attitudes, and learners’ emotions in the PTL lesson. A total of 141 migrant learners (79 forced migrants) and 13 teachers were involved in 23 2 h lessons. Teachers and learners gave high overall evaluations of the feasibility of the PTL protocol and of their pleasure from teaching and learning using PTL tools. Learners’ ease of learning and learning benefits were positively influenced by their perception of the proximity between their L1 and L2. Learners reported higher positive emotions and lower negative emotions during the PTL lesson, while forced migrants showed more hope and shame overall than voluntary migrants, as well as gained more benefits from PTL due to enjoyment. These findings suggest that the use of pedagogical translanguaging in migrants’ classrooms is feasible and develops positive attitudes and emotions, which are more pronounced in forced migrants. Full article

In this study, we respond to calls for more research on the motivation to learn a third language (L3), especially regarding how this motivation is influenced by linguistic distance in various second language (L2) contexts. We employed a comparative and mixed-method design to investigate whether L3 learners with a “longer L2–L3 linguistic distance” show significantly different L3 motivational constructs compared with L3 learners with a “shorter L2–L3 linguistic distance”. We recruited sixty university students majoring in English who were enrolled under same program curriculum in China, with half of them selecting French as their L3 and with the other half selecting Japanese. The French L3 group was labeled “shorter L2–L3 linguistic distance”, and the Japanese L3 group was labeled “longer L2–L3 linguistic distance”. We recruited learners from the same Chinese university to complete a Taguchi-based questionnaire on the L3 motivational system. The quantitative results revealed that the ideal L3 self, the ought-to L3 self, family influence and instrumentality promotion were significantly different between these two L3 groups. Qualitative results based on follow-up interviews with four participants showed that shorter L2–L3 linguistic distance contributed to higher instrumentality promotion, and family influence tended to be driven by practical concerns. These findings demonstrate how cross-linguistic factors may impact multilingual learners’ motivation and insights, which may be also of assistance to L3 acquisition and pedagogy. Full article

The purpose of this research was to investigate how the use of green screen technology affects vocabulary acquisition in LOTE (languages other than English) learners, particularly Chinese students learning French as a second foreign language. Two groups (a control group and an experimental group) with a total of 58 students participated in the study. Data were collected through in-class and delayed vocabulary tests, learning questionnaire, and semi-structured interviews. The study results demonstrate significant benefits in terms of providing an authentic learning experience, improving understanding, increasing motivation, and facilitating interaction. The results also confirm the technology’s effectiveness in enhancing both immediate and long-term vocabulary retention. The effectiveness is particularly evident for location-related words, as the technology provides visual context that facilitates recall of these words, which may not have easily retrievable mental images compared to more concrete words with tangible references. Further research can also be undertaken to compare the impact of virtual background on vocabulary retention with other immersive technologies. Nevertheless, virtual backgrounds are likely to be a cost-effective and accessible tool that can already offer promising improvements in learning outcomes and can be easily implemented with existing software like Zoom (5.2.0 or higher) and Tencent Meeting (1.3.0 or higher). Full article

The present study analyses the production rates of stop-unrelease amongst advanced French learners of English before and after training. Although stop-unrelease may be regarded as a minor issue in English pronunciation teaching, it has received some attention in recent years. Earlier studies showed that amongst “phonetically naive English listeners”, the lack of release of /p/, /t/ and /k/ leads to lower identification scores. The present study analyses the speech of 31 French university students majoring in English to measure the efficiency of an awareness approach on the production of stop-unrelease. The experiment comprised three phases with a test and a control group. During Phase 1, both groups were asked to read pairs of words and sentences containing medial and final voiceless stops. We chose combinations of two identical stops (homorganic) or stops with different places of articulation (heterorganic), as well as stops in utterance-final position. Namely, wait for me at that table over there, that pan, or I like that truck. In Phase 2, one group watched an explanatory video to increase awareness on stop-unrelease in English before reading Phase 1 words and sentences a second time. The remaining group was the control group and did not receive any training. Among the participants, 17 read a French text containing pairs of stops in similar positions to those in the English one, which served as an L1 baseline. In total, six students continued until Phase 3 (reading the same stimuli a month later; three in the control group and three in the test group). The results showed that sentence-final stops were overwhelmingly released (above 90%) in both English and French in Phase 1. Training had a significant impact on sentence-final stop-unrelease (p < 0.001), which rose from 9.65% to 72.2%. Progress was also visible in other contexts as in heterorganic pairs of stops. Based on these results, we strongly recommend the combined use of spectrograms and gestures to raise awareness in a classroom or for online learning so as to reach multiple learner profiles and further increase efficiency in pronunciation learning. Full article

Transcription is an important component of the writing process that affects the quality of children’s compositions. However, little is known about how transcription mode influences productivity or spelling accuracy, two word-level markers of compositional quality, among children learning to write in an additional language. To address this issue, we compared the effects of handwriting and keyboarding on text length and spelling in the compositions of L2 French learners. Grade 2 to 4 students (n = 48) in French Immersion were given two writing prompts and asked to produce one text on paper and one using a keyboard. The prompts were counterbalanced across the two writing conditions. The total number of words, total number of words spelled correctly, and proportion of correctly spelled words were calculated. A series of repeated measures ANOVAs revealed an advantage in both the average number of correctly spelled words and the proportion of correctly spelled words in the students’ compositions favouring the keyboarding condition. Conversely, the total number of words across conditions was not significantly different. Our findings suggest that keyboarding may offer an advantage over handwriting with respect to spelling accuracy in the context of L2 composition in the elementary years. Full article

This research paper addresses the challenge of providing effective feedback on spontaneous speech produced by second language (L2) English learners. As the position of pauses and lexical stress is often considered a determinative factor for easy comprehension by listeners, an automated pipeline is introduced to analyze the position of pauses in speech, the lexical stress patterns of polysyllabic content words, and the degree of prosodic contrast between stressed and unstressed syllables, on the basis of F0, intensity, and duration measures. The pipeline is applied to 11 h of spontaneous speech from 176 French students with B1 and B2 proficiency levels. It appeared that B1 students make more pauses within phrases and less pauses between clauses than B2 speakers, with a large diversity among speakers at both proficiency levels. Overall, lexical stress is correctly placed in only 35.4% of instances, with B2 students achieving a significantly higher score (36%) than B1 students (29.6%). However, great variation among speakers is also observed, ranging from 0% to 68% in stress position accuracy. Stress typically falls on the last syllable regardless of the prosodic expectations, with the strong influence of syllable duration. Only proficient speakers show substantial F0 and intensity contrasts. Full article

In recent decades, a vast literature has documented crosslinguistic influences on the acquisition of L2 phonology and in particular the effects of spelling on pronunciation. However, articulating these research findings in terms of taking into account the effects of L1 phonology and spelling on L2 pronunciation in language teaching remains to be examined. These studies are based on experimental cross-sectional methods and mainly focus on L2 English learning by speakers of languages with an alphabetic system. In French, there are few studies on crosslinguistic influences on the acquisition of the nasal vowels (//, // and /$\tilde{\epsilon }$/) and few experimental studies that point to a possible effect of orthography on the pronunciation of these phonemes. The results of experimental studies are difficult to transpose to the language classroom because they are based on word or sentence reading and writing activities, which are quite far-removed from the conversational activities practised in the classroom in interaction with peers and the teacher. Hence, we opted here for a case study of the effect of spelling on the production of nasal vowels in interaction tasks. We conducted a longitudinal study during the first year of extensive learning of French (4 h 30 per week). The results of a perceptive analysis by expert listeners show that (i) learners spell nasal vowels with an <n> or <m> in 98% of the obligatory contexts; (ii) most nasal vowels are perceived as nasal vowels in speech (72%), the others being perceived as vowels followed by a nasal consonant (19.5%) or as oral vowels (8.5%); (iii) consonantisation is stronger when the learner spontaneously produces a word than when (s)he repeats it, (iv) which decreases with time (learning effect) and varies (v) according to the consonant, /$\tilde{\epsilon }$/ being less consonantised than // and //. Finaly, we propose a didactic discussion in the light of intelligibility and influence of orthography. Full article

This article addresses the issue of access to the written word for deaf people whose main language is sign language. We question the status of sentence processing in the acquisition of a written language by deaf people, visual beings par excellence. This written language is both the written form of another language (namely a vocal language) and another modality, that of writing (as opposed to the oral form of language i.e., the face-to-face form of language), which they have not experienced in their own, non-written language. We highlight two points in the literature that we feel are crucial to addressing this issue: first, the significant linguistic distance between their L1 (SL) and their L2 (written vocal language), which severely limits the possibility of positive transfer from one to the other; and secondly, the evidence of a cognitive functioning specific to deaf people, marked in particular by higher processing capacities in the visual domain. Based on the results of two studies on the written output of deaf people, we suggest that particularities in the acquisition of the sentence are closely linked both to the structure of SL and to the visual functioning of this population. Finally, we emphasize the importance of using sign language as a metalanguage in teaching writing to deaf signers. Full article

Acquiring a consistent accent and targeting a native standard like Received Pronunciation (RP) or General American (GA) are prerequisites for French learners who plan to become English teachers in France. Reliable methods to assess learners’ productions are therefore extremely valuable. We recorded a little over 300 students from our English Studies department and performed auditory analysis to investigate their accents and determine how close to native models their productions were. Inter-rater comparisons were carried out; they revealed overall good agreement scores which, however, varied across phonetic cues. Then, automatic speech recognition (ASR) and automatic accent identification (AID) were applied to the data. We provide exploratory interpretations of the ASR outputs, and show to what extent they agree with and complement our auditory ratings. AID turns out to be very consistent with our perception, and both types of measurements show that two thirds of our students favour an American, and the remaining third, a British pronunciation, although most of them have mixed features from the two accents. Full article

In this paper, we demonstrate the use of Visible Vowels to detect formant and durational differences between L2 and L1 speakers. We used a dataset that contains vowel measures from L1 speakers of French and from L2 learners of French, with Italian, Spanish and English as L1. We found that vowels that are not part of the L1 phonological system are often pronounced differently by L2 speakers. Inspired by the Native Language Magnet Theory which was introduced by Patricia Kuhl in 2000, we introduced magnet plots that relate vowels shared by the French phonological system and the learners’ phonological system—the magnet vowels—to the vowels found only in the French phonological system. At a glance, it can be seen which vowels are attracted to the magnets and which vowels become further away from the magnets. When comparing vowel spaces, we found that the shape of the French vowel space of the English learners differed most from the shape of L1 speakers’ vowel space. Finally, it was found that the vowel durations of the L2 speakers are greater than that of the L1 speakers of French, especially those of the English learners of French. Full article

In this article, we explore the possibility of evaluating L2 pronunciation, and, more specifically, L2 vowels, without referring to a native model, i.e., intrinsically. Instead of comparing L2 vowel productions to native speakers’ productions, we use Pillai scores to measure the overlap between target vowel categories in L2 English (/iː/ — /ɪ/, /ɑː/ — /æ/, /ɜː/ — /ʌ/, /uː/ — /ʊ/) for L1 French, L1 Spanish, and L1 Italian learners (n = 40); and in L2 French (/y/ — /u/, /ø/ — /o/, /ø/ — /e/, /$\tilde{\mathtt{\varepsilon }}$/ — /e /, /$\widetilde{\mathtt{ɑ}}$/ — /a/, /$\widetilde{\mathtt{ɔ}}$/ — /o/) for L1 English, L1 Spanish, and L1 Italian learners (n = 48). We assume that a greater amount of overlap within a contrast indicates assimilated categories in a learner’s production, whereas a smaller amount of overlap indicates the establishment of phonological categories and distinct realisations for members of the contrast. Pillai scores were significant predictors of native ratings of comprehensibility and/or nativelikeness for many of the contrasts considered. Despite some limitations and caveats, we argue that Pillai scores and similar methods for the intrinsic evaluation of L2 pronunciation can be used, (i) to avoid direct comparisons of L2 users’ performance with native monolinguals, following recent trends in SLA research; (ii) when comparable L1 data are not available; (iii) within longitudinal studies to track the progressive development of new phonological categories. Full article