Awareness of L1/L2 differences: does it matter?

Abstract

This study is an investigation of the extent to which francophone learners of English as a second language (ESL) are aware of the differences between French and English question formation and how such awareness relates to their L2 performance. Three tasks were administered to 58 grades 5 and 6 francophone ESL learners. In a grammaticality judgement task, learners were asked to judge the grammaticality of English Wh– and yes/no questions. In a scrambled questions task, participants were instructed to create questions with sets of words written on individual cards. Some of the participants were also interviewed. Students’ own grammaticality judgement and scrambled questions tasks were used as stimuli for the interviews. On the grammaticality judgement task, questions in which the subject was a pronoun were judged more accurately than questions in which the subject was a noun. The most frequent non-target question forms that learners produced on the scrambled questions task were those in which a word (e.g. auxiliary do) was ‘fronted’ (placed at the beginning of a declarative sentence). The interview indicated that most students had a poor understanding of differences between English and French questions. Correlation analyses showed a positive relationship between students’ awareness of L1–L2 differences and their ability to correctly judge and form questions in English.

Keywords:

• metalinguistic awareness
• awareness
• L1 influence

Funding for this project was provided through a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. We are grateful to the teachers and students who generously agreed to participate in this research.

Notes

1. For the sake of simplicity, we will refer here to previously learned languages as L1 and the current target language as L2. Such a shorthand is not meant to deny the complexity of language acquisition that can involve many languages (See e.g. Odlin & Jarvis, 2004).

2. There are also some recent studies in which a contrastive component has been provided within more traditional L2 instruction (R. Sheen, 1996, 2005).

3. Where no auxiliary is present in the declarative SVO version of the question, the auxiliary ‘do’ is placed before the subject and is marked for person, number and tense, while the main verb in the sentence reverts to the infinitive form, e.g. Mary wants to go with us becomes Does Mary want to go with us?

4. Picard (2002) argues that Canadian French ‘does not allow inversion in wh– questions’ (p. 61). While this appears to be true in informal spoken language, literate French speakers are aware of the inversion rule for more formal speech and certainly recognise its grammaticality in the written language.

5. To measure students’ metalinguistic knowledge, Hu (2002) used a verbal explanation task in which participants had to orally explain the rules underlying target structure uses.

6. It should be noted that, in spoken English, the salience of auxiliaries in both yes/no and wh– questions may be so reduced that a learner could fail to hear them in the stream of normal speech. Proficient speakers (especially those who are literate) know that these non-salient auxiliaries are there, as illustrated by the fact that, in responding to a request for clarification of a question that was not clearly heard, native speakers will often pronounce the auxiliary more clearly. Nevertheless, in the stream of informal speech, the auxiliary in questions such as Where [are] you going? or [Do] you want to have lunch now? are extremely difficult to hear. This no doubt contributes to the perception by learners that English, like French, allows SVO order for both yes/no and wh– questions.