Vivienne Rogers: The role of chunks...
...in the development of French by instructed English learners
Location: Old Library Building, Research Beehive, room 2.20
Time/Date: 10th March 2011, 16:00 - 17:00
Full recording of the lecture available via ReCap.
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This study investigates the use of chunks to express negation in the elicited production of beginner and intermediate learners of French. Wray (2002) defines a chunk as a being stored whole in the memory and retrieved as such rather than being generated by the language grammar. Myles (2004, 2005) found that instructed English learners of French used such chunks in elicited production tasks to produce questions that they were not yet capable of generating. In this paper I will argue that learners not only use chunks in this way but that they actually generate them within the sentence, for example (the angled brackets indicate the chunk):
- Elle jouer golf. (chunk=whole phrase) She I don't like to‐play golf Target: Elle ne joue pas au golf. (She doesn't play golf).
- Elle jouer au golf. (chunk=syntactic unit) She NEG to‐play golf. Target: as given in (2).
Three groups of instructed learners of French were tested on an oral elicited production task designed to elicit 15 negative sentences. The results show that only the beginner group makes the most use of chunks of the type given in (1) whereas the low‐intermediate learners make extensive use of chunks given in (2).
However, the upper‐intermediate group no longer use either type of chunk in their oral production but instead produce target‐like utterances. Individual variation is high and not all learners produce such chunks. I suggest that these learners are using these chunks to express utterances that are outside their current grammatical competence. However, the shift between the type of chunk given in (1) and in (2) represents two different stages in development and suggests that the learners are breaking down the chunk into its syntactic constituents as they develop their grammatical competence before they establish the relevant underlying syntactic representation for negation in French.
Published: 24th September 2010