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2 - The Last Barriers in High-Level L2 Speech

Morphosyntax in Focus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 June 2018

By
Inge Bartning  and
Fanny Forsberg Lundell
Edited by
Kenneth Hyltenstam ,
Inge Bartning  and
Lars Fant
Kenneth Hyltenstam
Affiliation:
Stockholms Universitet
Inge Bartning
Affiliation:
Stockholms Universitet
Lars Fant
Affiliation:
Stockholms Universitet
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Summary

This chapter addresses the mastery of morphosyntax in L2 French in relation to the speakers’ command of formulaic sequences, information structure, low-frequent vocabulary and fluency. The studies underlying this chapter were all based on the InterFra corpus of oral production by highly proficient L2 speakers (university students and ‘cultural migrants’, and by native controls). Possibilities of nativelikeness according to a ‘pass-as-a-native’ perception test are presented, as well as a proposal for establishing differentiated high-level proficiency stages. A major finding is that highly proficient non-native speakers’ mastery of morphosyntax clearly differs from that of native speakers in cognitively challenging contexts. In addition, linguistic criteria are provided that discriminate between different highly proficient levels of L2 mastery and between L2 mastery and L1 acquisition. These criteria are: non-targetlike morphosyntactic forms, formulaic sequences and low-frequent vocabulary in contrast to fluency and information structure, which become nativelike.
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Chapter
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High-Level Language Proficiency in Second Language and Multilingual Contexts , pp. 50 - 72
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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