Effects of sociolinguistic awareness on French L2 learners' planned and unplanned oral production of stylistic variation

ABSTRACT

The present study evaluated the effects of explicit instruction on advanced French second language (L2) learners' (n = 18) contextually appropriate use of two stylistic variables (/l/ deletion vs. retention and ne deletion vs. retention) using two different task types. A planned and unplanned oral task was used to assess students' productive stylistic knowledge before and after the instructional treatment. Performance on both tasks was then compared to a corpus of native French (L1) speakers (n = 12) recorded under the same conditions. As hypothesised, the findings revealed that explicit instruction triggered changes in students' productive use of the target features; however, their ability to align to L1 stylistic norms was mediated by two factors: task types and linguistic complexity of the stylistic variants. Additionally, although instruction prompted change in the use of these variables, some learners reported being unwilling to use informal features, suggesting that personal speech-style preferences may also moderate the use of specific stylistic variants and should, therefore, be further considered in research examining the development of L2 sociolinguistic competence.

KEYWORDS:

• French L2 learners
• explicit instruction
• oral production
• tasks
• stylistic variation
• sociolinguistic competence

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the students who participated in the study and the following research assistants who worked so diligently on the transcriptions for the oral narratives: Jean-Daniel Guay, Ariane Tremblay, Alexis Dupont Rochette, and Christine Lévesque.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded in part by a grant to the first author from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 327117].

Notes on contributors

Leif M. French

Leif French is a professor of Applied Linguistics and French Second Language at Sam Houston State University. His work focuses on the cognitive aspects of SLA, language awareness, and teacher training.

Suzie Beaulieu

Suzie Beaulieu is an assistant professor at Université Laval, Québec, Canada. Her research interests include sociolinguistics applied to second language learning, instructed SLA, and teacher training.