Adverbial connectors join together sentences and units in a text to signal logical relations. Appropriately used, they can help the reader to make sense of the text. The usage of adverbial connectors can create problems for foreign language learners, and is often shown as under- , over- and misuse of connectors. In this study, a quantitative analysis of connector usage of advanced EFL learners’ and native speakers’ student writing is presented. For the current corpus-based study, three sub-corpora of the SUSEC (Stockholm University Student English Corpus) were chosen. The sample includes 164 linguistic essays from students at Stockholm University and 82 linguistic essays from students at King’s College in London. The analysis, where the learners’ connector usage is compared to that of native speakers, is based on 69 connectors. The results show that both the learners and the native speakers rely on a rather small set of these connectors in their writing. As a group, the advanced Swedish EFL learners underuse connectors in their written production. Additionally, the learners significantly overuse 12 and underuse 6 connectors. Similarities between the learners and the native speakers were found in the positioning of the connectors. Both groups prefer the most frequently used connectors in the medial position of a sentence, and prefer mostly the same set of connectors in the different positions of a sentence, although some differences in the positioning were also found. The findings create a basis for future research where a qualitative analysis of the connector usage could be carried out in order to increase knowledge of the interlanguage of the learners. The findings could also be used for pedagogical purposes.

Previous research from the perspective of the sociocultural theory of learning indicates that discussion and interaction with other people promote language learning. The purpose of the present study is to examine discussions of 12 German university-level students solving a linguistic task, a translation, in groups during their Swedish language lessons. The key point is to investigate the benefits of collaborative tasks in language learning. When translating the text together, the students verbalized their hypotheses about the Swedish grammar and compared their implicit conceptions with their fellow students. The students used many different strategies to give explanations to problematic linguistic phenomena. The discussions were usually democratic, but it has also shown that the students’ language skills and personality played a central role in the decision making process. Moreover, the analysis reveals that the translations produced by the groups were more accurate than those written individually. Finally, implications of these results and pointers to further exploration are discussed.

Proponents of communicative language teaching in foreign language classrooms assume that the learners will profit from interacting in the target language on meaningful topics. The present study investigated whether non-native speaker interaction constitutes a good learning situation. Four research questions were posed: how pupils deal with breakdowns in communication, if they use any strategies to avoid problems, if they collaborate and negotiate for meaning and consequently if open-ended conversations among learners promote language development. Pupils in a Swedish secondary school were recorded interacting in the target language and conversation analysis was used to examine the data. It was found that there was a common structure to the way that the pupils dealt with problems, a few strategies were used and the pupils also collaborated. However, the conversations lacked some of the characteristics of interaction between native and non-native speakers that research have shown to be conducive to language development. Also, almost no negotiation of meaning was observed. Based on these results it is argued that non-native speaker interaction constitutes a good learning situation but probably needs to be accompanied by more explicit instruction.

Cette étude d’ordre phonético-phonologique considère la prononciation en allemand L4 chez des apprenants tardifs cantophones de la première génération postcoloniale à Hong Kong. Pour ces locuteurs dont les langues source sont le cantonais (L1) et l’anglais (L2) de Hong Kong, ainsi que le putonghua/mandarin (L3), l’allemand est la quatrième langue orale (L4). La question des transferts linguistiques issus des langues source reste mal évaluée. À travers une analyseprincipalement auditive, nous cherchons à découvrir comment l’allemand lu est prononcé sous l’effet interférentiel attendu d’une ou de plusieurs langues source. Ce travail dégage des fautes typiques et quantifiables à travers l’exploitation d’enregistrements d’apprenants cantophones adultes. Ces données élicitées aux niveaux segmental et suprasegmental ont été comparées à celles d’un groupe contrôle de locuteurs natifs, ainsi qu’à la prononciation canonique retenue. Noustentons de déterminer les causes des déviances saillantes dues aux effets interférentiels des langues source relevant du niveau phonético-phonologique. Ce travail permettra de dégager des méthodes d’apprentissage plus adaptées, une fois les différents domaines identifiés, ayant trait aux difficultés spécifiques lors de l’acquisition de l’allemand L4. Ainsi, des exercices variés et bien adaptés à ce public d’apprenants permettront d’améliorer plus rapidement l’acquisition del’allemand oral. Ce travail était dicté par le souci de fournir un ensemble d’informations potentiellement utiles aux domaines linguistique et didactique / This thesis aims to investigate salient mispronunciations from Cantonese adult L4 learners of German in Hong Kong, in order to support the design of effective pedagogical and remedial instruction for pronunciation improvement. For these learners of the first post-colonial generation, the other source languages are Hong Kong English (L2) and putonghua/Mandarin (L3), both non-native/non-foreign languages. The overall aims of this study are to promote ourunderstanding of cross-linguistic interference between source languages and the target language in adult learners whose first language is genetically and typologically distant from German, as well as to identify typical linguistic features of German L4. The proposed approach involves a systematic contrastive description of phonology and phonetics primarily between German and Cantonese, followed by a shorter description of learners’ L2 and L3. To address the question of deviant features and language transfer, data gathered from students reading German were compared to native speaker data, as well as to a canonical form of pronunciation. The analysis of interlanguage data revealed segmental and suprasegmental deviations from the underlying canonical form, as well as contexts where L1 and L2 transfer effects are prominent. Thismethodology enabled us to propose an inventory of salient pronunciation errors, useful for the domain of linguistics and for pedagogical purposes. Though further studies should be conducted at both the segmental and suprasegmental level, this work contributes to our understanding of aspects of this particular L4 interlanguage

This Master's thesis deals with the phenomenon of learning Dutch as a foreign language. The paper draws upon the fundamental theories and methods associated with applied linguistics on second language acquisition, in particular on the interlanguage hypothesis. The theoretical basis to this study comes from psycholinguistic processes that accompany the second language acquisition, such as language transfer, fossilization, overgeneralization and variability. This section is followed by a brief summary of the theory of the Dutch article, in contrast with an outline on how definiteness and indefiniteness are expressed in Czech. The paper also mentions some recent findings on article acquisition by second language learners. The practical part describes and analyses a small corpus of written utterances by Czech students who followed courses of Dutch language and literature at three Czech universities. The corpus consists of utterances made by speakers at two levels of language proficiency. The thesis seeks to observe the differences between lower intermediate and upper intermediate students. The research focuses mainly on general tendencies in article use. Various factors that influence the use of this grammatical category are discussed. Based on the collected data, a number of hypotheses are formulated,...

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Les méthodologies de constitution de corpus linguistiques ont été amplement étudiées, mais sont moins abondantes quand il s’agit de corpus oraux ; ces méthodologies sont encore plus rares en ce qui concerne l’interlangue orale. Le projet CIL (Corpus Inter Langue), en cours de finalisation à l’Université Rennes 2 et sous la supervision de l’équipe d’accueil LIDILE (EA 3874), vise à la constitution d’un corpus de productions écrites et orales d’apprenants en FLE et ALE. Cette thèse concerne le corpus oral de FLE du projet global (CIL-FLE). Partant du constat que l’intérêt des linguistes pour la langue orale a systématiquement été en retard par rapport à celui porté à la langue écrite, nous nous intéressons dans un premier temps à l’étude de l’oralité dans différents domaines de la linguistique d’un point de vue historique et épistémologique. Le second chapitre est consacré à la linguistique de corpus de manière générale et au corpus en tant qu’objet linguistique en particulier. En ce qui concerne la linguistique de corpus, nous tentons de présenter les différentes méthodologies auxquelles les linguistes ont recours lorsqu’il s’agit de consulter des données : introspection, élicitation ou consultation de données authentiques. Le concept de corpus est ensuite analysé selon un ensemble de critères définitoires que nous étudions en détail, afin de proposer une définition du corpus linguistique. Le troisième et dernier chapitre est la mise en application des constats théoriques dans la constitution du corpus CIL-FLE : nous détaillons lesconstituants du corpus, les protocoles de collecte et d’archivage. C’est au protocole de transcription que nous nous intéressons en particulier, en insistant sur les difficultés de la transcription de l’interlangue. Le corpus CILFLE, qui représente environ 105000 mots, représente le fruit de ce travail et sera ainsi détaillé. / The need to design linguistic corpora to support research in linguistics has triggered the development of numerous studies exploring various approaches and methodologies regarding good practices for written corpus building. Fewer studies are available when it comes to spoken data and those that concern the interlanguage of learners are even rarer. The CIL project (Corpus Inter Langue), under completion at the University of Rennes2 and supervised by a research team specialising in the fields of linguistics and pedagogy (LIDILE), aims at building a large corpus of written and spoken productions in EFL and in FFL. This phd dissertation mainly focuses on the FFL (French as a Foreign Language) corpus (CIL-FLE).The first chapter of the thesis is dedicated to the study of oral speech as a linguistic object from both a historical and an epistemological perspective. The second chapter tackles the question of corpus linguistics generally speaking as well as the concept/ notion of corpus as a linguistic object. Regarding corpus linguistics, we will review and explore the diverse approaches and methods that are used so as to carry out research enquiries: introspection, elicitation or consultation of authentic data. The concept of corpus is then analysed according to/following a series of criteria which we will closely examine in order to propose a definition of the linguistic corpus. The third and last chapter will implement the former theoretical findings through the description of the CIL corpus design. Thus, corpus constituents, transcription and archiving protocols will be described in detail. We are particularly interested in the transcription protocol and we will insist on the difficulties encountered when attempting to transcribe learners ‘data. Finally, the CIL-FLE corpus, which contains approximately 105 000 words and was developed all along this phd, will be described.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have given rise to many distinct discourses in the field of literacy studies. The present study examined the discursive interplay between two of these discourses, namely the practical discourses of those who see themselves as empowered by ICTs and the theoretical discourses of theory and research literature on the notions of multiliteracies. Drawing on the emergent discourses from the interview data, this study explored the practitioners' underlying beliefs and their assumptions about technology-mediated new multiliteracies as opposed to traditional print-based literacy. As such the study also argued for a sustainable dialogue between the discourses of practice and discourses of theory and research, suggesting that the discursive interplay between these two discourse communities would contribute to the application of the complex theoretical notions to multiliteracy pedagogy. Employing a qualitative approach, the study drew on Bakhtin's (1986) notion of primary/secondary genres to depict the relevance of the notions of discourse in arriving at the underlying assumptions about the nature of multiliteracies and its implications. This study was broadly framed within a critical social research perspective (Fairclough, 2003). The notion of multiliteracies was explored from the standpoint of the New London Group (1996). Grounded Theory procedures (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) were also employed to identify major themes in the data, while general content analysis method was used to interpret the interview data. The main question that guided this investigation was as follows: How do expert practitioners' perceptions of new multiliteracies and their implications map onto their practices with new multiliteracies? The findings of this study pointed to the practitioners' willingness to implement new approaches in their literacy practices. Moreover, these findings highlighted the importance of a sustainable dialogue between the discourses of theory and practice to enhance literacy educators' pedagogical choices. The researcher hopes that the findings of this study contribute to the future teacher education policy and curriculum development in such a way that current pedagogical practices are expanded to include multiple literacies. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

While the role of pragmatic skills in a foreign or second language has been receiving increased attention both from a research and a language teaching perspective, there is still a lamentable scarcity of systematic empirical studies into the effectiveness of instructional methods in the teaching of pragmatics. Addressing this research gap, this article reports about a quasi-experimental study into possible differences between an explicit-inductive and an explicitdeductive instructional approach in the teaching of pragmatic skills in English as a Foreign Language (EFL), more specifically the teaching of offer refusals to 49 advanced adult EFL learners in Germany. The instruction consisted of three 90-minute lessons, which were spread out over the duration of a 15-week academic semester and designed according to the deductive principle and the inductive principle, respectively. While the deductive group was provided with metapragmatic rules directly at the beginning of the instruction, the inductive group only encountered such rules after engaging in language use and guided discovery. Production data was elicited by means of DCTs and role play in a pretest-posttest format. Effectiveness of instruction was operationalized by means of two indicators: Indicator 1 measured the increased usage of the strategies taught in class, while indicator 2 measured the approximation to a native speaker target. The results indicate that the gains in the inductive group surpassed those in the deductive group, suggesting that when situated within the explicit framework, inductive instruction is more effective in the teaching of pragmatic skills.