This study tests the effectiveness of written recasts versus models in the acquisition of the aspectual distinction between two past tenses in French, the passé composé and the imparfait with a pretest, repeated exposure, and posttest design. Participants were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 conditions: R (recasting: implicit negative feedback), M (modeling: pre-emptive positive evidence), and G (grammar: explicit positive evidence and negative feedback). The M and R groups read a different story with illustrations each week: (a) In the M condition, participants were shown a sentence corresponding to the illustration for 3 seconds, then were asked to answer a related question; (b) in the R condition, participants formed a sentence with given elements based on the illustration, then were exposed to the correct answer for 3 seconds; (c) the G group read traditional grammar lessons, took a short practice, and were presented with the answer key. Posttest results reveal that the R group performed significantly better than the G group but not the M group, partially supporting the hypothesis that recasting is the most effective form of feedback.

The acquisition of English verbal morphology has been mostly tested as a second language (L2) in English-speaking settings (only one cross-sectional study with native speakers of French in a foreign/L2 setting in Quebec (Collins, 2002), and never with French speakers living in France, who have much less exposure to English than their Francophone counterparts living in Quebec. The present cross-sectional study analyzes data from a group of 21 high school French speakers learning English in France to address two main research questions: (a) Do our learners exhibit nativelike performance in their use of the various past morphological forms across the lexical aspectual classes (e.g., Vendler, 1957/1967)? (b) Does their first language lead French speakers to overuse the English present perfect due to its morphological similarity with the passé composé? Our findings underscore the effect of lexical aspect on the use of past tense markers while highlighting a significant departure from the predicted developmental path of past tense marking: States are marked more consistently than telic events in the narrative task. Possible theoretical and methodological factors that might account for the present findings are discussed.Keywords tense and aspect; past tense morphology; aspect hypothesis; discourse hypothesis; English as a foreign language; French instructed learners; second/foreign language learning

This follow-up study on the acquisition of the aspectual distinction between the passé composé (PC) and the imparfait (IMP) investigates the differential outcomes of the results presented in an earlier study, Ayoun (2001), by pursuing two lines of research: the effectiveness of written recasts versus models and traditional grammar instruction, and the development of temporality in the interlanguage of French college students as second language learners (i.e., the Aspect Hypothesis). The earlier study found that all learners improved in their use of the PC but not the IMP. The R(recast)-group out-performed the M(model)-group and the G(grammar)-group, with a significant difference over the latter but not the former, which supported the hypothesis that recasts are the most effective form of treatment. The qualitative results of the present study weaken this finding because it was more difficult to distinguish among the three different treatments: (a) The G-group outperformed the R-and M-groups in accuracy and frequency in the PC; (b) all three groups decreased in their accuracy and frequency in the IMP but the G-group outperformed the other two groups; (c) the three groups were practically identical in the production of various predicate types in the PC and IMP on the preand posttests; and (d) overall, it was the G-group's performance that showed a greater aspectual use of predicate frequency and type in the IMP. These new results partially support a prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis, according to which the use of past tense morphology is influenced by lexical class, but they offer only tentative support for the Imparfait Spreading hypothesis. A few preliminary suggestions regarding pedagogical applications are offered.

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