How French speakers reflect on their language: a critical look at the concept of metalinguistic awareness (original) (raw)
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d <sist.eleonora@gmail> This study explores the relationship between metalinguistic awareness and orthographic control. A previous study on a French-speaking sample in Niamey (Niger) revealed an inverse correlation between the metalinguistic scores at an Acceptability task and the number of orthographic errors in the responses to that task. The authors put forward that orthographic control involves an implicit control over the relationship between the orthographic form of words and their meaning, which can be ascribed to an intuitive, 'epilinguistic' form of language awareness. The same design was then replicated with two more samples of French-speaking preadolescents of the same age range (11-14), one in Toulouse (France) and the other in Abidjan (Côte d'Ivoire). Considering the three samples together, the current study aimed at verifying: (a) whether the metalinguistic and orthographic performance varied as a function of geographical and sociolinguistic specificities; (b) to what extent the inverse correlations between orthographic errors and metalinguistic performance were confirmed on a broader sample. The results showed that the participants in Abidjan outperformed their peers in Niamey and Toulouse on both metalinguistic awareness and orthographic control grounds. The inverse correlation between metalinguistic performance and orthographic errors was fully confirmed on the whole sample. 1
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This cross-linguistic comparison of metalinguistic development in French and English examines early ability to manipulate derivational suffixes in oral language games as a function of chronological age, receptive vocabulary, and year of schooling. Data from judgment and production tasks are presented for children aged between 5 and 8 years in their first, second, or third school year in the United Kingdom and France. The results suggest that metamorphological development is accelerated in French relative to English. The French advantage encompasses knowledge of a broader range of suffixes and a markedly greater facility for generalizing morphological knowledge to novel contexts. These findings are interpreted in relation to the word formation systems of English and French, and the educational context in each country.
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This article deals with multilingual students’ metalinguistic awareness in L3 French at the university level. The aim of the article is to study how the students’ multilingualism influences their lexical strategies in a meaning construction task and to answer the following research questions: What type of crosslinguistic influence can be observed in an oral meaning construction task of L1-L2-L3 cognate words? What kind of metalinguistic strategies do the multilingual learners adopt in this test? The corpus consists of 12 first year students’ productions; students were divided into three different proficiency levels (evaluated with a DIALANG test). The results show that the deliberate activation of L3, L2s and L1 by cognate words had a great impact on the meaning construction of the L3 words. Nevertheless, well learned common words seemed to resist this (combined) crosslinguistic influence. The analysis also revealed that in meaning construction, the participants had recourse to seve...
Il a été avancé que des apprenants expérimentés développeraient des niveaux élevés de conscience métalinguistique (MLA), ce qui leur faciliterait l'apprentissage de langues subséquentes (p.ex., . De plus, des chercheurs dans le domaine de l'acquisition des langues tierces insistent sur les influences positives qu'exercent les langues précédemment apprises sur l'apprentissage formel d'une langue étrangère (p.ex., , et proposent de délaisser le regard traditionnel qui mettait l'accent sur l'interférence à l'origine des erreurs des apprenants pour opter pour une vision plus large et positive de l'interaction entre les langues. Il a été démontré que la similarité typologique ainsi que la compétence dans la langue source influence tous les types de transfert (p.ex., Ringbom, 1987transfert (p.ex., Ringbom, , 2007). Cependant, le défi méthodologique de déterminer, à la fois l'usage pertinent d'une langue cible en tant que résultat d'une influence translinguistique (p.ex., Falk & Bardel, 2010) et d'établir le rôle crucial de la MLA dans l'activation consciente de mots ou de constructions reliés à travers différentes langues, demeure.