The Acquisition of Sociolinguistic Competence in a Study Abroad Context by Vera Regan, Martin Howard and Isabelle Lemée

Near-Native Sociolinguistic Competence in French: Evidence from Variable Future-Time Expression

“…The learners produced some but not all neutral variants as well (p. 109). The conclusion that instructed learners tend to overuse formal variants when compared to NSs is supported by other studies (Regan, Howard, & Lemée, 2009;van Compernolle, 2015), and van Compernolle has called this aspect of sociolinguistic competence "non-native pragmatic conservatism" (p. 60).…”

“…Finally, two investigations have addressed sociostylistic variation, specifically pertaining to formality. Neither immersion learners (Nadasdi et al, 2003), nor university learners who had spent an academic year in France (Regan et al, 2009) favoured the use of the IF with the subject pronoun vous, as has been reported for certain groups of NSs. Regan et al (2009) did, however, find that style formality constrained use.…”

“…Neither immersion learners (Nadasdi et al, 2003), nor university learners who had spent an academic year in France (Regan et al, 2009) favoured the use of the IF with the subject pronoun vous, as has been reported for certain groups of NSs. Regan et al (2009) did, however, find that style formality constrained use. The researchers differentiated between formal and informal style based on the interview topic and found that the participants favoured the IF with formal topics and the PF and futurate present with informal topics.…”

“…Together, these investigations offer evidence of near-nativeness with the variable use of two grammatical structures that form part of sociolinguistic competence in French. Furthermore, although instructed learners tend to exhibit pragmatic conservatism (van Compernolle, 2015) by using formal variants at a higher rate than NSs (e.g., Mougeon et al, 2010;Regan et al, 2009), Donaldson (2016) argued, on the basis of these results, that "this type of stylistic infelicity can be overcome at the near-native level" (p. 496). We seek to ascertain whether this participant group exhibits near-nativeness with another variable structure -future-time expression.…”

“…Second, several previous investigations have examined many of the same linguistic factors that have been shown to predict NS use and found differing results across studies (Blondeau, Dion, & Ziliak Michel, 2014;Gudmestad & Edmonds, 2016;Howard, 2012b, Mougeon et al, 2010Nadasdi et al, 2003;Regan et al, 2009). For instance, concerning adverbial specification, the presence of a temporal adverbial favoured the occurrence of the futurate present among Canadian immersion students (Mougeon et al, 2010;Nadasdi et al, 2003), Irish studyabroad learners (Regan et al, 2009), adult Anglo-Montrealers (Blondeau et al, 2014), Level 3 study-abroad learners , and study-abroad learners with high proficiency (Gudmestad & Edmonds, 2016). However, this effect was not found for all study-abroad and foreign-language classroom learners reported on by Edmonds and Gudmestad (2015) and Gudmestad and Edmonds (2016).…”