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

The present collection of ten articles is an excellent addition to the growing body of work on the acquisition of French both as a second language (L2) and as a first language (L1). The interest of the present volume is that it brings together researchers who assume different theoretical paradigms and present empirically grounded studies of native speakers of several different L1s (Arabic, English, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish). It provides a good sense of the range and depth of issues that are currently being investigated. Marzena Watorek and Clive Perdue show both that L2 speakers who lack the grammatical means for expressing meaning (such as tense and aspect) can compensate in other ways (for instance, by using adverbs like aujourd'hui, après) and that even where L2 speakers have grammatical knowledge (as in the case of spatial expressions) they may not be able to organize them in discourse like native speakers. Victorine Hancock and Nathalie Kirchmeyer continue this theme by showing that while advanced L1 Swedish speakers of L2 French know the grammatical properties of relative clauses, they do not use them in discourse in the way that native speakers do. Suzanne Schlyter compares the production of a range of adverbials by L1 and L2 learners of French. She finds that while L1 learners use some adverbs before others, suggesting that the functional structure of the sentence with which they are associated develops incrementally, L2 learners show no such incremental development — the full functional structure of the sentence is available to them from the start of acquisition. Martin Howard shows that the French pluperfect is acquired later than the passé composé and the imperfect, and appears not to be aided by classroom instruction. Florence Myles argues that the development of unconscious knowledge of finite and non-finite verb forms (for instance, mange/manger) by UK classroom learners of French over the first two years of instruction shows similarities to L1 learners. Daniel Véronique describes the development of French negation in speakers of Moroccan Arabic, and suggests that they show similar patterns of development to speakers of other L1s. The chapters by Mireille Prodeau and Jonas Granfeldt both consider the acquisition of gender concord between nouns, articles and adjectives (Prodeau additionally examines subject–verb number agreement). Prodeau finds that L1 English speakers are persistently different from natives in their ability to make appropriate gender concord in speech. Granfeldt shows that early bilinguals acquire gender concord like monolingual French children, but that late bilinguals are initially different, although they improve over time. Vera Regan shows that a period of study abroad sensitizes L2 learners of French to the variable deletion of ne in informal registers. Richard Towell and Jean-Marc Dewaele examine the relationship between the development of grammatical knowledge and fluency in French and come to the interesting conclusion that improvement in grammatical knowledge may be an effect of improvement in fluency in speech, rather than the other way round. Overall, this is a worthwhile collection on a variety of acquisitional topics from different theoretical perspectives.