Transfer effects on French EFL learners’ use of textual phrasemes
(2013) EUROSLA23 — Location: Amsterdam (28.August.2013)
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- Abstract
- The aim of this study is to examine the role of transfer on French EFL learners’ production of textual phrasemes, i.e. multi-word units that organise the referential content of a text, e.g. contrasting (in contrast to, differs significantly from), concluding (in conclusion, it can be concluded that) (Granger and Paquot, 2008). The study applies Jarvis’s (2000) methodological framework on learner corpus data. The International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) (Granger et al. 2009) appears to be ideally suited to analysing the three potential effects of L1 influence described by Jarvis (2000). Intra-L1-group homogeneity in French EFL learners’ performance is investigated by comparing all the essays written by French learners to verify whether they behave as a group with respect to a specific L2 feature. Inter-L1-group heterogeneity in learners’ interlanguage performance is verified by a comparison of the French component of ICLE and other L1 sub-corpora (e.g. texts produced by German, Dutch and Swedish learners). Unlike Jarvis (2000), I made use of comparison of means tests and post hoc tests to confirm this second L1 effect. To establish intra-L1-group congruity between learners’ L1 and interlanguage performance, French EFL learners’ use of a specific multiword sequence is compared to the use of its equivalent form in a comparable corpus of essays written by French-speaking students collected at the University of Louvain, i.e. the Corpus de Dissertations Françaises (CODIF). Applying Jarvis’s (2000) unified framework on learner corpus data unveils interesting patterns of transfer of function, transfer of the phraseological environment, transfer of style and register, and transfer of L1 frequency. Learners’ knowledge of words and word combinations in their mother tongue includes a whole range of information about their preferred co-occurrences and sentence position, stylistic or register features, discourse functions and frequency. Primings for collocational and contextual use of (at least a restricted set of frequent or core) L1 lexical devices are particularly strong in the mental lexicon of adult EFL learners. They are the result of many encounters with these lexical items in L1 speech and writing. Mental primings in the L1 lexicon probably influence EFL learners’ knowledge of English words and word sequences by priming the lexico-grammatical preferences of an L1 lexical item to its English counterpart. These results support Kellerman’s (1984) claim that the ‘hoary old chestnut’ according to which transfer does not afflict the more advanced learner “should finally be squashed underfoot as an unwarranted overgeneralization based on very limited evidence.”
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Paquot, M. (2013). Transfer effects on French EFL learners’ use of textual phrasemes. EUROSLA23, Amsterdam. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/202733