Following a review of the literature on French immersion, this thesis considers the
implications of the systematic transcription of oral texts for linguistic analysis. In
transcribing a corpus of spoken French by children attending a French immersion school
and a corpus of children from Quebec (both from tape recordings and included in the
appendice), the transcription conventions proposed by the Groupe Aixois de Recherche en
Syntaxe were applied.
In chapter III, some of the most common deviations from the norm that occur in
the French immersion corpus are discussed, and for the most part these aberrations reflect
the results of previous error analyses done on second language learners.
In chapters IV and V, a study of "slip-ups" is undertaken. Slip-ups are repetitions
or self-corrections, referred to as "rates" in this thesis. They occur frequently both in the
Francophone and French immersion corpus.
The purpose of this study is to analyse the intrinsic structure of these hesitations
(that were previously brushed off as un-grammatical) and to discover whether the
repetitions or self-corrections produced by the French immersion speakers share
characteristics with or differ from the slip-ups identified in the Francophone corpus.
Whereas an enumeration of grammatical errors will almost always show that the
French spoken by French immersion pupils is not as "good" as that spoken by
Francophone children, the analysis of slip-ups is a more objective endeavor. And indeed,
the study reveals some unpredicted results. On certain parts of the sentence, such as the
predicate, French native speakers surprisingly slip up more often than French immersion children, while the latter tend to hesitate more often on subjects and indirect objects.
Further analysis reveals that native French speakers almost always repeat (or
correct) entire word groups, or syntagms, although they don't always complete such
groups. The French immersion children, on the other hand, do not always repeat the
entire word group when they slip up, but they do seem to finish their construction (or
sentence), once it has started.
Finally, the situation (formal or informal) appeared to only affect the speakers in
the Francophone corpus: they hesitated slightly more often in a formal setting, whereas
the situation did not seem to affect the results for the French immersion speakers.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/5112 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Santen, Marcia-Ellen |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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