La relative relativement acquise - une étude sur l´acquisition de la proposition relative en francais L2 écrit par des apprenants suédophones adultes

Författare

Ida Olsson

Summary, in English

Numerous researches on the acquisition of a second language show that the learner acquire the syntactic structures of a language in a certain order, independent of the order they have been introduced to learner. Bartning and Schlyter (2004) have designed an itinerary with six stages of development that show the expected development of the acquisition of French L2 by Swedish adults in oral production. One of the syntactic structures studied for the establishment of the developmental sequences is the subordination. Subordination represents an important part of the acquisition of a language because it allows the speaker or writer to communicate more information in one phrase. Within this category one finds the relative clause, of which the acquisition stretches over all the 6 stages of development. The itinerary by Bartning & Schlyter (2004) shows that the complexity of the relative clause seems to increase along with the acquisition of the relative pronoun. As the use of the relative pronoun differ a lot between Swedish and French, this element makes one interesting subject to examine.

The study by Bartning and Schlyter (2004) is based on oral productions by Swedish adult learners. In order to test Bartning & Schlyter’s itinerary on written production, the present study is based on a corpus consisting of 106 texts written by Swedish adult learners of French, with different level of proficiency (Ågren, 2008).

The results show that the acquisition of the relative clause is slightly faster in written language than in oral. There are two main explanations of the results. Firstly, the written language offers more time to think, reconsider and make changes in the message which can result in a more correct production. Secondly, although the use of relative pronouns in Swedish is flexible in common spoken language, it is more formal in written language and presents some similarities with French that could speed up its acquisition in written production.

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