Focus on French as a Foreign Language: Multidisciplinary Approaches (review)

J.M. Dewaele's edited collection Focus on French as a Foreign Language: Multidisciplinary Approaches is the first volume of its kind written in English focusing on the acquisition and production of French interlanguage. It is a 10-chapter volume of articles focused on beginning to advanced learners from a variety of linguistic backgrounds.

Chapter 1, by Watorek and Perdue, 'Psycholinguistic Studies on the Acquisition of French as a Second Language: The "Learner Variety" Approach,' provides a summary of and commentary on studies of adult language acquisition undertaken within a learner variety approach. The authors are interested in the idiosyncratic productions characterizing the early stages of acquisition and the grammatical yet inappropriate productions of the advanced stages.

Chapter 2, 'Discourse Structuring in Advanced L2 French: The Relative Clause' by Hancock and Kirchmeyer, uses relative clauses to illustrate clause combining. The authors suggest that the use of subordinators as a measure of syntactic complexity should be evaluated at both the micro- and macro-syntactic levels. They describe several relative structures that characterize the discourse structuring of advanced learners and help identify advanced stages of acquisition.

Chapter 3, by Schlyter, 'Adverbs and Functional Categories in L1 and L2 Acquisition of French,' argues that children acquiring two languages simultaneously begin by using adverbs on the lower end of the adverb hierarchy and move to higher-level adverbs only later on, a pattern supporting a Structure Building Model. Conversely, the authors demonstrate, adult L2 learners use higher-level adverbs from the earliest stages of acquisition, a pattern supporting the Strong Continuity Hypothesis.

Chapter 4, 'The Emergence and Use of the plus-que-parfait in Advanced French Interlanguage' by Howard, provides an analysis of the acquisition and use by advanced learners of the plus-que-parfait to express the meaning of reverse order. In addition to his investigation of this form–function relation, the author outlines a theoretical framework for the analysis of this form in Reichenbachian terms.

Chapter 5, by Myles, 'The Emergence of Morpho-syntactic Structure in French L2,' examines the emergence of morpho-syntactic structure in the French of classroom learners. The author considers the structure of early utterances and the role of the verb phrase for such learners and discusses the importance of her findings in relation to the role of Universal Grammar in the process of L2 acquisition.

Chapter 6, 'Syntactic and Semantic Issues in the Acquisition of Negation in French' by Véronique, undertakes, first, to describe the development of negation in Moroccan Arabic learner varieties of French compared to other learner varieties of French and, second, to examine the syntactic and semantic factors accounting for the developmental sequences documented.

Chapter 7, by Prodeau, 'Gender and Number in French L2: Can We Find Out More about the Constraints on Production in L2?' seeks to find out more about knowledge and procedures related to number and gender via a series of tasks and via real-time production and contrasts the findings from various situations of production (constrained to free verbal tasks).

Chapter 8, 'The Development of Gender Attribution and Gender Agreement in French: A Comparison of Bilingual First and Second Language Learners' by Granfeldt, adopts a longitudinal, cross-learner perspective in exploring the development of gender in the grammars of adult L2 learners and of children acquiring two L1s. The goal is to determine whether there are qualitative differences in how gender is acquired by the two groups and how the development proceeds in the two cases.

Chapter 9, by Regan, 'From Speech Community Back to Classroom: What Variation Analysis Can Tell Us about the Role of Context in the Acquisition of French as a Foreign Language,' analyzes the acquisition by L2 learners of native-speaker patterns of variation and of sociolinguistically sensitive variables. The study highlights the developmental stages of an acquisition process that includes a year abroad in a target-language community in addition to classroom learning.

Chapter 10, 'The Role of Psycholinguistic Factors in the Development of...