This study is an investigation of the extent to which francophone learners of English as a second language (ESL) are aware of the differences between French and English question formation and how such awareness relates to their L2 performance. Three tasks were administered to 58 grades 5 and 6 francophone ESL learners. In a grammaticality…

Two English-speaking six-year-olds attending a French-speaking kindergarten in Montreal were tested for the content of their French L2 (second language) utterances. An adaptation of the mean length of utterance (MLU) index was used to judge the order of acquisition in the encoding of semantic-syntactic relations in the second language. The same…

Investigated how learners' developmental readiness interacted with instruction in second language (L2) acquisition. Researchers pretested francophone children (age 11 to 12) on their knowledge and use of English questions, determined their developmental stages, then exposed them to numerous English questions in class. Posttesting indicated that…

Describes a research project in which the acquisition of French by two six-year-old boys, native speakers of English, was observed longitudinally. (CFM)

Describes a study which examines "introducer forms" used by English as a second language learners to initiate picture descriptions. Results suggest that students receiving formal second language instruction process the input data in ways which are more "acquisition-like" and often not consistent with what the teacher intends…

Observed primary and secondary classrooms in which students received instruction in their second language (L2), interviewed teachers about students' knowledge and use of the first language and second language, and examined the students' ability to understand and produce written and oral samples in their L2. Students were Inuits in Northern Quebec…

Investigation of the developing oral English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) skills of native French speaking elementary students in a five-month intensive ESL course found that teachers' use of form-focused instruction and corrective feedback influenced students' correct use of "-ing" structures and adjective-noun order. (47 references) (Author/CB)

This paper is based on a longitudinal study of the development of questions in the spontaneous speech of two anglophone boys learning French by attending French language schools. The development of form-meaning relations in information questions in the children's French L2 speech was examined and comparisons were made with the same form-meaning…