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The influence of classroom input and community exposure on the learning of variable grammar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2016

RAYMOND MOUGEON  and
KATHERINE REHNER
RAYMOND MOUGEON*
Affiliation:
York University
KATHERINE REHNER
Affiliation:
University of Toronto/Mississauga
*
Address for correspondence: Raymond Mougeon, Department of French Studies, York Hall, Glendon College, York University, 2275 Bayview Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M4N 3M6rmougeon@yorku.ca
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Extract

As pointed out by Carroll (Carroll), our team has investigated the influence of input on the spoken French competence of older Ontario bilinguals. Our research has examined the learning of invariant and variable aspects of French grammar. We focus here on the learning of variation, since it is an under-researched topic not covered by Carroll. Our research examines adolescent speakers of Ontario French from French-medium schools (e.g., Mougeon & Beniak, 1991), same-age immersion students (e.g., Mougeon, Nadasdi & Rehner, 2010) and advanced learners from a bilingual university (e.g., Mougeon & Rehner, 2015). Two key dimensions of input are teacher classroom speech and frequency of use of French in the community for the Franco-Ontarian students and amount of extra-curricular interactions with Francophones for the FSL students. Having collected corpora from these student groups, we compared the output of learners with primarily classroom-based input with that of learners with broader ranging (extra-) curricular input. The availability of teacher in-class recordings for these learner groups has been crucial in identifying additional factors influencing these students’ output.

Type
Peer Commentaries
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 21 - 22
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

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