Comparative constructions in French-speaking Belgian learners of English: A contrastive approach

Broisson, Zoé [UCL] Van Goethem, Kristel [UCL]

This study will provide a contrastive analysis of comparative constructions in French and English, on the one hand, and investigate the acquisition of these constructions by French-speaking learners of English in French-speaking Belgium, on the other. A difference will be made between pupils following the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) method and pupils enrolled in the traditional language learning settings. CLIL is one of the leading didactic methods to have been developed to promote multilingualism through education in Europe (Hiligsmann et al., 2017). This approach involves the teaching of content school subjects through the medium of a target language distinct from the school’s mainstream language (Eurydice, 2012). Although the CLIL method has been extensively documented internationally (Ruiz de Zarobe,2008; Rumlich, 2016; Seikkula-Leino, 2007), its impact on second language acquisition remains a subject of scholarly debate. Assessing the impact of CLIL is the purpose of an ongoing large-scale longitudinal and interdisciplinary research project in French-speaking Belgium. This particular study will contribute to this line of research by contrasting the use of comparative constructions in native French and native English and by investigating the CLIL and non-CLIL pupils’ use of English comparative constructions. We first investigate the similarities and differences between French and English through a contrastive analysis with comparative constructions as a tertium comparationis. We base this analysis on the description of French and English ‘ordinary’ comparative constructions, illustrated in (1-3), in grammars by Biber et al.(1999), Grevisse (1975), Riegel et al. (1994) and Quirk et al. (1978), leaving aside ‘idiomatic’ comparatives such as the construction may/might as well (Sawada, 2007). This type of construction has been extensively studied within the frameworks of syntax and semantics (Bresnan, 1973; Fuchs et al., 2008), and cognitive or functional typology (Andersen, 1983; Heine, 1997). The contrastive analysis reveals that French and English have similar syntactic (and irregular) ways of marking comparison at their disposal, such as the construction [Modifying adverb + Adjective/Adverb/Phrase (+correlative construction)] illustrated in examples (1) and (2). However, English presents an additional morphological alternative to mark the comparative of superiority, in the form of the suffix –er as illustrated in example (3). (1) Snow White is more beautiful (than the queen) (2) Blanche Neige est plus belle (que la reine) (3) Snow White is taller (than the queen) We hypothesize that this discrepancy between the two languages acts as a potential obstacle to the correct use of comparative constructions by our population of French-speaking learners of English. From a usage-based perspective such as the one adopted in Ellis and Cadierno (2009), the main challenge faced by learners consists in the competition between the specific constructions of their native and foreign language. In light of our contrastive analysis, we formulate the following three research questions: 1. Which formal differences can be observed between comparative constructions in L1 French and L1 English? 2. Which formal types of comparative constructions do learners use in their L1 and L2 productions? 3. Do CLIL learners develop a more native-like use of comparative constructions (in terms of formal types of constructions, diversity and accuracy) thanks to more target language input? We propose to answer these research questions through the extraction and the analysis of 399 instances of comparative constructions in five small-scale comparable corpora:one control corpus of L1 English, two corpora of L1 French (CLIL and non-CLIL)and two corresponding learner corpora of L2 English (CLIL and non-CLIL). The data constituting the French L1 and English L2 corpora were collected in 2017 among 438 sixth-grade secondary school pupils averaging 18.5 years old and attending the schools involved in the Belgian project. The data constituting the English L1 corpuswere collected in 2016 among 70 university students from Florida (USA), averaging 19.4 years old. The five corpora used in this study were compiled according to the same criteria, and contain data that result from the production of a same writing task (email to a friend) averaging 303.76 words in length. When examining the distribution of syntactic, morphological and irregular comparatives in the datasets, our preliminary results reveal, as expected, that both CLIL and non-CLIL learners show a tendency to use less morphological comparatives in English than the native speakers from the control corpus. This tendency is found both in the overall distribution of comparative constructions in the corpora, as well as when examining comparatives of superiority exclusively. Therefore, the results of our analysis suggest that comparative constructions represent an area of difficulty for French-speaking learners of English from Belgium. This is in part because learners have to overcome their preference for syntactic constructions likely due to the influence of their mother tongue, but also because of other factors transpiring from our corpus analysis, such as the overall higher productivity of comparative constructions in English as compared to French in the student populations under study. Through the analysis of the errors made by our learners, we also identify that the two groups of pupils diverge with regards to the frequency and the type of error related to the use of comparative constructions. We distinguish three types of errors: (1)Functional errors, due to confusion between comparative and superlative marking; (2)Formal errors consisting in the use of a syntactic comparative in domains taking morphological marking; and (3) Syntactic errors, due to the addition or omission of syntactic elements within the comparative construction. We observed that the non-CLIL learners made errors in all three categories, whereas the CLIL learners only made errors of the functional type. The results of the corpus analysis also highlight that CLIL pupils generally form English comparative constructions more frequently and more diversely than non-CLIL pupils, but non-CLIL pupils use comparatives in proportions and in collocations that are more native-like. Both the CLIL and the traditional teaching methods each have their advantages (and drawbacks), but ultimately we argue that the CLIL approach produces better learning outcomes in the case of comparative constructions: less native-like in form, perhaps, but with a lower rate of error and a higher degree of diversity. References Andersen, P. (1983). Word Order Typology and Comparative Constructions.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Biber, D., Johansson, S. & Leech, G. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. 4th impr. Harlow: Pearson education. Bresnan, J. (1973). Syntax of the Comparative Clause Construction in English. Linguistic Inquiry, 4 (3), 275-343. Ellis, N., & Cadierno, T. (2009). Constructing a Second Language. Introduction to the Special Section. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 7, 111-139. Eurydice. (2012). Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) at school in Europe. Belgium – French community: national description – 2004/5. 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