Bulon, Amélie
[UCL]
Meunier, Fanny
[UCL]
The present paper falls within the framework of an interdisciplinary project on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in French speaking Belgium. The project aims to assess CLIL at the interface of linguistic, cognitive and educational perspectives (Hiligsmann et al. in preparation). In this paper we specifically focus on the acquisition of Dutch and English phraseological units by French-speaking CLIL (immersive setting) and non-CLIL (non-immersive setting) secondary school pupils. Several studies (e.g. Zydatiß 2007; Lorenzo & Moore 2010; Jexenflicker & Dalton-Puffer 2010; Gené-Gil et al. 2015; Martínez 2015; Bulon et al. forthcoming) have been carried out to compare the language proficiency of learners in immersive and non-immersive settings using global measures of complexity, accuracy and/or fluency, typically referred to as CAF (Housen et al. 2012; Norris & Ortega 2009). The present study focuses on the pupils’ phrasicon, i.e. their phraseological lexicon, and reports on two main analyses, viz.: 1) an overview of the phraseological errors (focus on accuracy), and 2) an analysis of the variety/range of the phrasicon (focus on complexity). Since CLIL programs provide more target-like and input-rich environments than non-CLIL programs - and can therefore be considered closer to L1 acquisition because of their inherent usage-based approach - we hypothesize that CLIL pupils have a phrasicon that is both more accurate and more varied than that of pupils in non-CLIL settings. The participants are 5th year French-speaking secondary school pupils in immersive settings (n=90) and non-immersive settings (n=90) learning English as a foreign language. The analysis is based on a corpus of written productions in the form of 180 e-mails (90 per category) on two similar topics. Wordsmith Tools (Scott 2012) was initially used to extract the phrasemes (word clusters at that stage). The list was then manually checked, pruned and organized per category of phraseme (referential phrasemes, textual phrasemes and communicative phrasemes; see Granger & Paquot 2008). The errors found in the phrasemes produced by the learners were then classified on the basis of Thewissen’s (2008) and Hong et al.’s taxonomies (2001). The various categories and error types used in the study will be presented and illustrated during the talk. At the time of writing the present abstract various statistical analyses are still being carried out but our preliminary results reveal the following trends: a) of all types of phraseological errors, the most frequent ones (both for immersive and non-immersive pupils) are: wrong choice of verbs and nouns in referential phrasemes (existing word but wrong selection); wrong choice of prepositions (be they dependent or not), and the use of two separate words (open compounds) instead of one-word (solid) compounds; b) both groups of pupils make more grammaticality errors (formally inexistent phraseme; e.g. in love for* [with]) than acceptability errors (formally existing phraseme but inappropriately used in context; e.g. The hotel had a great view on* the ocean [of/over]); c) immersive pupils seem to have more difficulties with compounds than non-immersive pupils (more errors in each category); d) with regard to the sources of phraseological errors, L1 transfer appears to be the most prominent among the three major categories (possible L1 transfer, possible transfer from learner’s other L2 and possible intralingual errors), and this for both groups of pupils; e) more intralingual errors are found in the non-immersive group; f) overall, the phrasicon of immersive pupils tends to be more varied. In the light of our current results, we can argue that phraseological use remains problematic for foreign language learners, even for those who are exposed to a much larger quantity of input. Even though immersive pupils tend to produce a more varied phrasicon than their peers, they still tend to rely heavily on their L1 and thus produce non-native like phrasemes. Our initial hypothesis that CLIL pupils have a phrasicon that is both more accurate and more varied than that of pupils in non-CLIL settings is thus only partly validated as only the variety was higher for CLIL pupils. Our results also support the idea that the acquisition of phraseological units requires explicit teaching, awareness-raising and focus on form activities (see Meunier (2012) for a review of possible instructional intervention types favoring the acquisition of the phrasicon in a second/foreign language), no matter the quantity of input being provided.
Bibliographic reference |
Bulon, Amélie ; Meunier, Fanny. Comparing the “phrasicon” of teenagers in immersive and non-immersive settings: does input quantity impact range and accuracy?.Learner Corpus Research (LCR) (Bolzano, du 04/10/2017 au 07/10/2017). |
Permanent URL |
http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/188119 |