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Inflectional verbal morphology, the system of correspondences between grammatical meanings and their means of expression, is an area of language which is difficult for adult L2 learners. The purpose of this thesis is to develop a pedagogical tool for Anglophone adult learners presenting French verbal morphology with a focus on semantics. This thesis adopts the view that explicit teaching of grammar is the most effective with these learners. Using theoretical insights from the Meaning-Text Theory, Le Morpheur, an Internet-based conjugator, has been developed. In order to see a fully-conjugated form using Le Morpheur, the user selects from a table of inflectional meanings those he wishes to express. In this way, the user becomes aware of all the meanings which must be combined to produce a verbal form. This resource was tested with a group of first-year French students at Dalhousie University. The participants were enthusiastic about Le Morpheur and the manner in which it presents French verb conjugation. These encouraging results indicate that continuing development and evaluation of this semantic-based pedagogical approach is desirable.

Cette thèse s’inscrit au sein des recherches sur l’acquisition de la temporalité. Elle vise à étudier l’acquisition et l’expression de la temporalité en français par les apprenants persanophones. L’objectif majeur étant d’identifier et de décrire les moyens linguistiques de transmettre l’information temporelle par nos sujets enquêtés. Notre recherche se concentre particulièrement sur les moyens de référence au « passé ». La description de la temporalité se caractérise par deux aspects : la référence à la morphologie verbale d’une part et le recours aux moyens pragmatiques (le lexique, les adverbes temporels, le principe de raconter les événements dans l’ordre de leur occurrence) d’autre part. La morphologie verbale et son développement se trouvent au cœur des analyses des données recueillies. Les formes verbales sont examinées dans une perspective formelle et fonctionnelle tout en s’appuyant sur une méthode fonctionnaliste. L’enquête de terrain a été conduite auprès de trois apprenantes iraniennes qui résident en France. Il s’agit d’un corpus longitudinal (oral et écrit) afin de relever les traces du développement progressif dans l’acquisition de la temporalité. Nous nous interrogeons notamment sur les étapes de développement morphologique dans la description de la temporalité. Les résultats des analyses favorisent non seulement l’étude comparative de trois apprenantes, mais aussi leur confrontation avec les apprenants d’autres recherches menées en différentes langues sources et cibles. L’objectif principal est de mettre en lumière les phénomènes permanents dans l’acquisition de la temporalité en L2. / This thesis is in the field of research on the acquisition of temporality. It aims at studying the acquisition and the expression of French temporality by the persanophones learning. The major goal is to identify and describe the average linguistics to transmit temporal information by our surveyed subjects. Our research concentrates particularly on the means of reference to the « past ». Two aspects characterize the temporality description: the reference to verbal morphology on the one hand and the recourse to the pragmatic means (the lexicon, adverbs temporal, the principle of telling the events in the order of their occurrence) on the other hand. Verbal morphology and its development are in the centre of the data analyses collected. The verbal forms are examined in the formal and functional prospect, all while being based on a functionalist method. The fieldwork has been conducted near three Iranian learning French who resides in France.! It is a question of a longitudinal corpus (oral and writing) in order to raise the traces of the progressive development in the acquisition of temporality. We wonder in particular about the stages of morphological development in the description of temporality. The results of the analyses support not only the comparative study of three learning, but also their confrontation with learning from other research undertaken in various source and target languages. The main aim is to clarify the permanent phenomena in the acquisition of temporality in L2.

Dans l’apprentissage du français écrit, la norme orthographique représente un lieu de difficulté majeure. Confronté à des complexités multiples, tout scripteur aura un long trajet à parcourir avant d’arriver à la maîtrise complète des traitements orthographiques, et ceci est sans doute d’autant plus vrai lorsqu’il s’agit de s’approprier le système orthographique du français dans une langue étrangère. Cette étude vise donc à analyser la réalisation orthographique, chez les apprenants chinois du français L2. Pour ce faire, nous examinons les données issues d’une tâche écrite semi-spontanée, en nous attachant plus particulièrement au profil développemental des apprenants chinois, et leur tendances interlangagières face aux problèmes de l’orthographe lexicale, de l’accord en nombre et genre et de la morphologie verbale. En outre, une analyse des erreurs commises par les apprenants, ainsi que les explications possibles pour interpréter ces erreurs sont également présentées, en faisant référence aux caractéristiques spécifiques de l’apprentissage de la langue étrangère. / In the area of written French, the orthographic learning represents a major difficulty. Faced with multiple complexities, any writer will have a long way to go before arriving at the complete control of spelling, and this is probably more true when it comes to appropriating this French system in a foreign language which is typologically distinct from the French language. This study aims to analyze the orthographic realization in French L2, for Chinese learners. To do this, we examine data from a semi-spontaneous writing task, focusing in particular on the developmental profile of learners, and their interlanguage tendencies in relation to the problems of lexical orthography, number/gender agreement, and verbal morphology. In addition, an errors analysis as well as possible explanations for interpreting these errors are also presented, with reference to the specific characteristics of L2 learning.

This thesis investigates the developpment of gender agreement in determiners and adjectives in the spontaneous speech of L2 French by five groups of Swedish learners: beginners at the university, secondary school students, university students, teacher candidates and PhD students. Different types of determiners are examined, such as definite and the indefinite articles. Adjectival agreement is studied in different positions in relation to the noun, such as the attributive anteposition, the attributive postposition and the predicative position. The aim is to identify the developmental sequence of gender agreement through a longitudinal study of learners at different levels of acquisition. The analysis is based on spoken language, i.e. 81 interviews belonging to the InterFra-corpus, Stockholm University. Our data also includes 8 oral productions from a control group of native speakers. The study is in three parts: one for the agreement between determiners and nouns, another for the agreement between adjectives and nouns and, finally, a study considering agreement between all three items within the noun phrase, i.e. determiner, noun and adjective (Det-N-Adj). A sequence of acquisition for gender agreement on determiners and adjectives is proposed based on the productions of four learner groups and compared to the six developmental stages suggested by Bartning and Schlyter (2004). Results have showed that there is an acquisition order of gender agreement in different parts of the nominal phrase, according to the type of determiner and the positions of the adjective. A qualitative analysis has shown a random use of gender agreement on determiners and some nouns are used with both genders on the determiner. Also, the type-token ratio is very low at the beginning of the acquisition, which partly explains the high accuracy rate (100 %). The study considering agreement between all three constituents within the noun phrase revealed that advanced learners have higher accuracy rate for gender agreement on adjectives within the noun phrase with the presence of a determiner that marks gender distinction (i.e. a non-elided, singular determiner). Results also showed that the feminine form of the adjectives remains difficult at higher acquisitional levels.

La compréhension orale du français langue étrangère constitue un objectif clé dans le processus d’apprentissage d’une langue étrangère. Néanmoins, les étudiants chinois de spécialité FLE dans les universités chinoises ont souvent des difficultés en compréhension orale. La présente étude tente d’exploiter la banque de donnée CLAPI (Corpus de langues parlées en interaction) pour proposer des pistes de l’enseignement de la compréhension orale du FLE en milieu universitaire chinois. Le travail présente d’abord le contexte culturel et d’enseignement pour mieux interpréter la culture d’enseignement-apprentissage du FLE en Chine ; puis notre recherche fait appel aux études théoriques sur le phénomène de compréhension orale en langue étrangère, aux celles sur les apports des corpus. Ensuite, nous effectuons une recherche sur le terrain auprès des étudiants et des enseignants de français en milieu universitaire chinois afin de dégager les aouts et les limites dans l’enseignement/apprentissage du cours de compréhension orale. En confrontant les théories de base et le contexte d’enseignement chinois aux résultats obtenus dans notre enquête, nous arrivons à apporter les réflexions sur l’exploitation du corpus oral pour l’enseignement de la compréhension orale au contexte chinois, ainsi que les propositions s’adressant surtout à nos collègues de français en milieu universitaire chinois. / Listening comprehension is a key objective in the process of learning a foreign language. The Chinese students often find understanding oral French difficult.Based on this fact, this paper attempts to use the database CLAPI (Corpus de langues parlées en interaction) to propose some paths for teaching listening comprehension in the context of Chinese universities.This research begins with the presentation of educational and cultural context for interpreting the culture of teaching in China; then the paperconsists of a review of foreign language listening comprehension andthe contributions of the corpus; and then, we carry out this study in the context of Chinese universities, with students and teachers of French, in order to find advantages and limitations in the teaching and learning of listening comprehension. Based on the theories, the Chinese context of French teaching andthe results obtained in our study, we bring our reflections and proposals on the teaching of oral corpus for listening comprehension in Chinese context.

The nature of the bilingual mental lexicon and how the L1 and the L2 interact in language production and processing has been the focus of decades of research from linguistic, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic perspectives. In spite of this significant body of evidence, the degree to which the L1 influences L2 production and processing remains an area of debate, especially with respect to formal features such as grammatical gender. While it is clear that non-nativelike production and processing of L2 grammatical gender persist even in highly-proficient adult bilinguals, the underlying representation of the L1 and L2 gender features and how this representation affects the use of gender in the L2 is currently unclear. Furthermore, there is no evidence at present regarding the nature of the L1-L2 grammatical gender system when the L1 and the L2 have asymmetric gender systems (in other words, differ in number of gender values), as is the case with German, which bears three gender values (masculine, feminine and neuter), and Spanish and French, which each display two gender values (masculine and feminine). This dissertation investigates the representation of and interactions between the L1 and the L2 at the level of the formal gender feature, with a particular focus on language pairings with asymmetric gender systems. Through complementary data from L2 production and processing, I examine the representation of the asymmetric grammatical gender systems in the mental lexicon of L1 Spanish-L2 German and L1 French-L2 German bilinguals and the consequences this asymmetry between the L1 and L2 gender systems has on gender use strategies in the L2. From the perspective of bilingual lexical access, this research contributes new evidence to inform existing psycholinguistic theories of L1-L2 gender interactions and also proposes the Asymmetric gender representation hypothesis, a new model to account for the unique integrated nature of the gender system in bilinguals with L1-L2 asymmetric gender systems. From a language acquisition perspective, the present study provides new data on L2 gender use strategies with asymmetric gender systems, formulating the L1 transfer continuum, which extends existing proposals to include the degree of (a)symmetry between the L1 and the L2. This research also connects theoretical proposals regarding gender agreement in functional-lexical code-switches (specifically, switches within the Determiner Phrase such as dieGER-F mesaSPA-F or elSPA-M TischGER-M) to bilinguals’ preferences in code-switching between two languages that display formal gender. Taken together, all of these complementary perspectives addressed in this dissertation offer a well-rounded perspective of grammatical gender in asymmetric gender systems specifically, and contribute novel evidence regarding the interactions between the L1 and the L2 in the bilingual mental lexicon in general.

In the light of recent findings regarding age and cumulative language exposure in the domain of Second Language Acquisition, the present study examines how starting age and linguistic input influences Swedish learners of French in a formal instructional setting. In contrast to natural settings, research suggests that a younger starting age in formal settings does not result in more advanced long-term competences in the target language. For the benefits associated with a younger age to be triggered, significant amounts of rich linguistic input need to be obtained by the learner on a daily basis. To test the validity of these findings, two groups with different starting ages were asked to fill in a questionnaire about their age and language contact as well as to perform a grammar and vocabulary test. A correlation analysis showed that an older starting age did in fact have a statistically significant relationship with higher test results and that the participants who reported having more frequent self-regulatory habits of studying French also performed better than the ones with little to no extracurricular exposure. However, a regression analysis did not manage to confirm these correlations and did instead find that other variables such as motivation and which group the participants belonged to have a much stronger significance than mere starting age and the amount of received input.