This study aims to advance the understanding of sociolinguistic competence among near-native speakers and to further knowledge about the acquisition of variable structures. We conduct a quantitative analysis of variable future-time expression in informal conversations between near-native and native speakers of French. In addition to examining…

The second language (L2) acquisition of tense, aspect, and mood/modality (TAM) has been widely explored as it holds the promise of a better understanding of the L2 learners' linguistic competences, particularly semantically and morpho-syntactically. This study focuses on the acquisition of the subjunctive mood by L1 English learners of L2 French…

Situated within the recent new wave of second language acquisition studies investigating the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation, this article draws on a longitudinal database of advanced French interlanguage to explore a number of issues that have not yet been extensively investigated. They concern the issue of individual variation in the…

This article first presents an overview of some trends behind the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation in a second language. A study is then presented that aims to test the validity of these trends in a quantitative study of a range of socio- and morpho-phonetic variables in French, including liaison, /l/ deletion, and subject-verb agreement…

It is suggested that although patterns learned as a part of native language acquisition may interfere with learning a second language, the use of metalanguages may promote an understanding of the native language that in turn contributes to learning others. Specific examples of classroom exercises are included. (MSE)

Three studies comparing the respective roles of interlanguage universals and natural language transfer in determining learners' judgments of grammaticality used college students of French in their second, third, and fourth semesters as subjects. In the first experiment, the subjects were exposed to both grammatical and four types of ungrammatical…

This paper discusses the interlanguage conversation as a process in an institutional setting. The interaction type in question is language proficiency interview and the material discussed is a series of interviews of French second language learners whose mother tongue is either Finnish or Swedish. These interviews are compared to non-evaluative…

Compares Italian native language instruction and instruction in English and French as a second language and discusses how the similarities may be used to improve the effectiveness of language teaching. (MSE)

Examines the inferencing procedures used by university-level second language (L2) learners of French to guess at the meaning of unfamiliar words in a written L2 text. The article combines qualitative and quantitative research methodologies and compares the strategies used by students assessed as high or low in French proficiency relative to their…

This study investigated the effects of systematic use of similarities between the native and second languages on the lexical competence of second language learners. Subjects were 209 first- and second-year English-speaking university students in French language classes. The students were pre- and post-tested for their visual recognition of…

Forty-eight American (L1) and 48 Dutch students (L2), half of whom had computer science backgrounds and half of whom did not, were tested for their use of either scientific text (ST) syntactic structures or the less difficult common syntax when writing technical discourse (in Appendix). Results indicate that both L1 and L2 technical writers wrote…

A collection of studies of second language acquisition in Swedish, Dutch, Spanish, French, German, and English is presented using a cross-linguistic perspective. The following topics are covered: (1) cross-linguistic first language perspectives on second language acquisition research; (2) use of typological markedness conditions in Swedish as…

A study of the interlanguage of bilinguals and multilinguals compared the oral French proficiency of 20 native Swedish-speaking and 20 Finnish-speaking university students as evidenced in error patterns in oral tests. With the exception of phonological and phonetic errors in pronunciation, errors were classified by word class (article, noun,…