This article explores French L1 speakers' attitudes toward French L2 speakers' negation use. Negation in prescriptive grammars calls for a pre-verbal ne and a post-verbal element like "pas." Although orally "ne" deletion is frequent, it is rarely or never taught. One common, albeit meagerly supported, explanation is that L1…

This article describes a collaborative research project with four Quebec college teachers offering French and ESL classes designed to support immigrant students' bilingual learning. Using action research, a professional learning community was created that allowed the researcher and teacher participants, through cycles of planning, action, and…

This study investigates modality in textbooks designed for learners of English by exploring the frequency and distribution of modal verbs in two corpora--one of authentic native-speaker language and a pedagogical one used by francophone learners of English in Quebec--with a view to identifying areas where added support for learning may be…

Cognates are known to facilitate second language acquisition and use, as learners tend to assign to a new L2 word the meaning of a similar L1 word. Consequently, for L2 tests that rely largely on lexical items, performance may prove inflated for examinees whose L1 shares many cognates with the language being tested. This article examines the…

This article examines the salience and content of representations of language education in a corpus of English- and French-Canadian newspapers. Findings suggest that English-Canadian newspapers foreground official-language education issues, in which public schools are represented as the primary means by which Canadians can gain equal access to…

Grounded in the cross-linguistic influence(s) (CLI) literature, this study used objective measures to compare the use of English, lexical richness and syntactic complexity, and grammatical accuracy and fluency in the texts of three groups of Grade 6 French immersion students: Canadian-born anglophones (C-A), Canadian-born multilinguals (C-M), and…

Due to the growing number of plurilingual learners in the world today (Hammarberg, 2010), the present multiple case study examines four plurilingual participants' beliefs toward first language (L1) and second language (L2) mediation in the acquisition of French as a third language (L3). During a 16-week classroom-based study in a French university…

This article explores the use of gesture by a French language teacher during lexical focus on form (FonF). The analysis compares pre-emptive FonF (before a problem in communication has occurred), and reactive FonF (after a problem has occurred) and looks at the differences between teacher-initiated and learner-initiated FonF in the use and type of…

The French CEFR vocabulary profiles as presented in the "Référentiels"--while a valuable resource for a wide range of applications focused on lexical content--result from introspection, intuition-based judgements, and unquantifiable experience. The result is a specification of vocabulary that has been largely untested from a…

This comparative inquiry examines the multi-/bilingual nature and cultural diversity of two distinctly different linguistic and ethnic communities in Montreal--English speakers and Chinese speakers--with a focus on the multi/bilingual and multi/biliterate development of children from these two communities who attend French-language schools, by…

This article examines how a second language (L2) dialect affects how accurately the L2 is perceived and produced. Specifically, the study examined differences between the production and perception of French vowels /i/, /y/, and /u/ by learners of either Quebec French (QF) or European French (EF). These vowels differ across the two varieties, both…

This study examines factors correlated with the use of "nous" and "on" by university students formerly enrolled in French immersion programs. Their variant frequency and stylistic appropriateness are compared to those of (1) former core French university students; (2) French as a second language (FSL) speakers in a francophone environment; and (3)…

This article first presents an overview of some trends behind the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation in a second language. A study is then presented that aims to test the validity of these trends in a quantitative study of a range of socio- and morpho-phonetic variables in French, including liaison, /l/ deletion, and subject-verb agreement…

This article is a brief discussion of some exercises in guided translation and comparative analysis designed not only to increase students' competence in translation and knowledge of French but also to make them more attentive to their English. (CFM)

Trends and issues in immersion programs are discussed, including the rationale behind implementation of immersion programs and attitudinal and academic differences between immersion and non-immersion students. The need for more documentation on the dynamics of the immersion classroom and the need for more cultural experiences are stressed. (MSE)