Phonetic norm versus usage in advanced French as a second language
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Alain Thomas
Abstract
This article is drawn from a large-scale ongoing study on linguistic progress in advanced French as a second language (FL2). The performance of 48 English-speaking students who spent their third year of university in France (the ‘experimental’ group)has been compared to that of 39 classmates who chose to stay and study at home in southern Ontario, Canada (the ‘control’ group).
The analysis presented here will be limited to three morpho-phonemic variables where native speaker usage can differ considerably from official norms, i.e., ‘liaison’, schwa and the negative particle ne. Results generally point to different pronunciation difficulties at the advanced level than at the beginners' level. Also, comparisons between the experimental and the control groups lead to a reappraisal of the notions of ‘norm’ and phonetic ‘progress’ in spoken French.
© Walter de Gruyter
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Preface
- Variation in the group and the individual: Evidence from second language acquisition
- On the interactional effect of linguistic constraints on interlanguage variation: The case of past time marking
- The relationship between the group and the individual and the acquisition of native speaker variation patterns: A preliminary study
- Acquisition of the internal and external constraints of variable schwa deletion by French immersion students
- Phonetic norm versus usage in advanced French as a second language
- Vous or tu? Native and non-native speakers of French on a sociolinguistic tightrope
- External reviewers
- Index of articles in Volume 42 (2004)
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Preface
- Variation in the group and the individual: Evidence from second language acquisition
- On the interactional effect of linguistic constraints on interlanguage variation: The case of past time marking
- The relationship between the group and the individual and the acquisition of native speaker variation patterns: A preliminary study
- Acquisition of the internal and external constraints of variable schwa deletion by French immersion students
- Phonetic norm versus usage in advanced French as a second language
- Vous or tu? Native and non-native speakers of French on a sociolinguistic tightrope
- External reviewers
- Index of articles in Volume 42 (2004)
