Session 1C

This PhD research focuses on the relationship between language acquisition and socialization in second language (L2), and in particular on the expression of causal relations in minimal narratives, i.e. two-event narratives. It is part of a larger multidisciplinary and longitudinal project on the impact of socialization on conceptual restructuring in Syrian learners of French. Our work is based on the hypothesis that interpreting real-world causality partly depends on sociocultural schemes, i.e. sociocultural ways of conceptualizing, segmenting and linking sets of events (Hong et al., 2000). Thus, this research's objectives are twofold: 1) explore how the type of socialization of Syrian immigrants in France might affect French L2 development over time, and 2) analyze the role of sociocultural schemes' appropriation in the conceptualization and verbalization of events, especially looking at the perception, selection and encoding of causal relations.
Previous research on links between immersion and linguistic development has often focused on international students in university contexts (Boz et al., 2018), which only partially reflects the socializing opportunities of adult immigrants. Furthermore, research on event construal has given more attention to single events, motion events or temporal-aspectual markings and examined the impact of language specific structures on perception and conceptualization (Flecken et al. 2015, Starren 2017). Those studies have shown that speakers of different L1s exhibit different patterns when constructing narratives - whether in terms of granularity, verb selection or information organization – but have not investigated causal markings. Moreover, few studies consider sociocultural factors to explain intra- and inter-individual variation, let alone in relation to conceptualization and cognition.
In line with our goals, socio-cultural data will be collected through questionnaires. In addition, data will be gathered in L2 French by Syrian learners living in France and in L1 French through a non-linguistic segmentation task and a scene retelling task. In both tasks, visual attention will be measured through eye-tracking, as patterns of visual attention can be considered a reflection of underlying conceptualization processes (Flecken et al. 2015). The non-linguistic task aims to examine whether event perception and segmentation is a language-independent cognitive process or if it is influenced by language structures and sociocultural schemes. Our presentation will focus on our methodology as well as on preliminary quantitative and qualitative analyses of patterns in causality marking in both oral and eye-tracking data elicited through the second task.


Boz, U., Barrantes, L., & Tweedie, M. G. (2018). Second Language Socialization in Higher Education: An Exploratory Case Study. The Journal of Educational Thought, 51(3), 361-384.
Hong, Y., Morris, M. W., Chiu, C., & Benet-Martínez, V. (2000). Multicultural minds: A dynamic constructivist approach to culture and cognition. American Psychologist, 55(7), 709-720.
Flecken, M., Carroll, M., Weimar, K., & Von Stutterheim, C. (2015). Driving Along the Road or Heading for the Village? Conceptual Differences Underlying Motion Event Encoding in French, German, and French–German L2 Users. The Modern Language Journal, 99(S1), 100-122.
Starren, M. (2017). What comes second. In Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact, 241-262. 

Nos travaux de thèse cherchent à déterminer le rôle que peuvent jouer les corpus oraux multimodaux dans l'apprentissage de compétences interactionnelles orales. L'exploitation de corpus pour enseigner et apprendre à interagir fait actuellement partie des méthodologies didactiques qui sont expérimentées par de nombreux enseignants et apprenants de FLE selon différentes modalités (Etienne, Jouin 2019 ; André 2019). Cette confrontation à la langue cible s'inscrit dans le prolongement de l'utilisation de documents authentiques en didactique (Holec 1990). Des expérimentations de l'apprentissage sur corpus (ASC) (Johns 1991) sont menées en français depuis quelques années pour acquérir des compétences socio-interactionnelles à l'oral, notamment dans le cadre du projet FLEURON, qui propose un corpus multimodal interrogeable par un concordancier intégré (André 2016), outil central dans nos travaux de thèse. Ces expérimentations sont très encourageantes dans la mesure où elles montrent que les apprenants, en observant et en analysant les données, mettent en œuvre des activités métalangagières et des stratégies métacognitives qui leur permettent de s'approprier plus facilement et de façon plus pertinente les règles de fonctionnement de la langue parce qu'ils les dégagent eux-mêmes.
Nos travaux de thèse s'intéressent plus particulièrement à l'enseignement et à l'apprentissage des compétences narratives interactionnelles, en exploitant le corpus FLEURON. Nous constituerons un corpus d'apprenants en interaction puis nous conviendrons d'un fait précis du récit que nous travaillerons par la méthode d'ASC. Il pourra s'agir d'un marqueur comme « en fait » ou « du coup », d'un temps, ou d'un verbe qui est réinvesti dans les récits. En parallèle de ces séances d'ASC, nous ferons observer aux participants des interactions comportant des récits dans leur séquentialité. Cela fera l'objet d'une étude longitudinale dès le mois de septembre 2022.
Nous espérons discuter de la méthodologie de recueil de données : comment recueillir des interactions d'apprenants naturelles et spontanées, malgré les contraintes de l'étude qualitative et longitudinale ? Nous pourrions également discuter des spécificités du récit à l'oral, pour compléter nos lectures.
André, V. (2019). Des corpus oraux et multimodaux authentiques pour acquérir des compétences sociolangagières. In Gajo L., Luscher J.-M., Racine I., Zay F. (eds), Variation, plurilinguisme et évaluation en français langue étrangère. Peter Lang, 209-223.
André, V. (2016). FLEURON : Français Langue Etrangère Universitaire, Ressources et Outils Numériques. Origine, démarches et perspectives. Mélanges CRAPEL, 37, 69-92.
Etienne C., Jouin E. (2019). Constituer des ressources pédagogiques pour enseigner le français oral à partir des recherches menées en interaction. In Gajo L., Luscher J.-M., Racine I., Zay F. (eds), Variation, plurilinguisme et évaluation en français langue étrangère. Bern : Peter Lang, 225-240.
Holec, H. (1990). « Des documents authentiques, pour quoi faire ? », Mélanges pédagogiques, 64-74.
Johns T. (1991). Should you be persuaded: Two samples of data-driven learning materials. In Johns T., King P. (dir.). Classroom Concordancing, English Language Research Journal, 4, 1-16.

This paper presents a study on the comprehension of disagreements by advanced L2 learners of French. The aim is to study at which moment in the sequential context they understand the upcoming disagreement, and through which (para)verbal resources.
Conversation analysis studies describe disagreements as "non-preferred actions", since they generally go against the social cohesion and thus are prefaced with hesitations, pauses and mitigators (Pomerantz 1984). The preface signals the upcoming "problem" and delays and attenuates the disagreement. The preface's importance is shown in psycholinguistic studies stating that L1 speakers start deciphering the incoming utterance from its start (Barthel et al. 2016).
The above studies raise the questions on how L2 learners understand different types of disagreement markers in preface position: which (para)verbal resources do they attend to, and is the preface sufficient to identify the disagreement or is more context needed? What are the similarities and differences between L2 learners and L1 speakers of French? For L2 learners' interactional and pragmatic competences, comprehension is crucial, without which the learner is not able to interact in an appropriate manner.
We analysed disagreements from spoken authentic interactions of corpora of L1 French with the method of conversation analysis. The disagreement markers were categorized and include different types and constructions, from monosyllabic hesitation markers like "ben", to constructions like the partial agreement "oui, mais" and the epistemic stance "je sais pas".
Based on the analyses, an experiment was designed and is currently conducted with 200 L2 learners (L1 German or Italian), and 100 L1 speakers. The experiment contains two tasks: an online questionnaire and a stimulated recall. The questionnaire includes authentic spoken disagreement sequences in L1 French. The length of the initial disagreement utterance is altered to investigate where in the sequential context the disagreement is understood: from the first part of the preface up to the whole utterance. The participants answer written questions reflecting their comprehension of the disagreement. In the stimulated recall, the participants motivate their answers, where we can analyse which (para)verbal resources they identify and attend to.
The experiment is ongoing. The first preliminary results from the questionnaire of the L2 learners with L1 German show that only the preface is often not sufficient to understand the upcoming disagreement, but that the whole utterance is often not needed either.
This paper will discuss the conversation analyses of the disagreements and present the global experimental results from both tasks and the three participant groups.


References:
Barthel, M., Sauppe, S., Levinson, S. C., & Meyer, A. S. (2016). The timing of utterance planning in task-oriented dialogue: Evidence from a novel list-completion paradigm. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1858. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01858 
Fasel Lauzon, V., Pekarek Doehler, S., & Pochon-Berger, E. (2009). Identification et observabilité de la compétence d'interaction : le désaccord comme microcosme actionnel. Bulletin VALS-ASLA, 89, 121-142.
Pomerantz, A. (1984). Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In J. M, Atkinson & J, Heritage. Structures of Social Action (pp. 57-101). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.