As a very effective means of communication, language has always been a topical issue that has aroused the curiosity of researchers. French, like other languages, is well and truly present in the ...world, from Europe to America via Africa. The French language now maintains a very strong link with those they use it. In Algeria, for example, although it occupies a very important place, the French language is not seen in the same way by all Algerians. This is due to historical, cultural and sociological factors. Thus, in the field of education, where French is considered an essential knowledge, its representation differs not only among the learners themselves but also among the educational and administrative staff. For everyone, French reflects an image; it can be ameliorative or pejorative. Our study revolves around the representations of the French language in the school environment, and in particular, among learners of the 4th year of the middle cycle. This raises a few questions: what relationship do these learners have with this language, and to what extent would this influence their level and their choice (at secondary school or at university)? To do this, we proceed with a questionnaire intended for these learners in order to try to answer these questions. This survey resulted in a certain heterogeneity of representations among FLE learners.
The objective of this article is to determine the place given to the cultural dimension in the teaching of French as a foreign language in the primary cycle in Algeria. At time when foreign ...language-culture teachers insist on the need to integrate the culture conveyed by the target language, the educational reform of 2003 envisages the opening of the Algerian school to foreign cultures and civilizations with the aim to provide the learner with a set of linguistic, cultural and intercultural skills, allowing him to participate in (inter)cultural exchanges and to access universal knowledge. The results of a questionnaire survey, conducted among teachers, reveal the priority given to the linguistic dimension to the detriment of the cultural dimension, due to a lack of teacher training.
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The aim of this paper was to determine the role of specificity in the English article suppliance of L1 Serbian speakers. Its impact on the suppliance of the definite article (the), the indefinite ...article (a/an), and the zero article (Ɵ) was determined based on a 40-item questionnaire. The items were classified into four groups defined by the combinations of two semantic features: ±specific and ±definite. Differences in article suppliance were studied between a group of English and non-English language majors in order to take into account the level of L2 proficiency. The population of L1 Serbian/L2 English speakers was chosen since Serbian is an articleless language and is, unlike English, considered to code specificity. The results indicated statistically significant differences between the participants in terms of correct article suppliance and L2 proficiency in favor of the English language majors. However, no impact of specificity on article suppliance was noted for either group of participants.
The European Council has been instrumental in the standardization of language competence levels and certifications with the guidelines provided in the Common European Framework of Reference for ...Languages (CEFR) published in 2001 and later reviewed in 2020 with the Companion Volume with New Descriptors (CEFRCV). Cambridge Assessment English and Trinity College are two of the highest regarded institutions at the international level that grant their language certificates following the language competence levels provided by the CEFR. For this reason, the current study is grounded on the conviction that those certificates should meet certain principles of the Framework as a form of guarantee that they are assessing the CEFR level correctly. In particular, this paper focuses on the speaking skill and the rubrics of assessment used by the two afore-mentioned institutions. The rubrics of Trinity and Cambridge for the assessment of the oral production at the B2 CEFR level were considered for the purposes of this study – in particular, the rubrics that assess the oral production in the Integrated Skills in English (ISE-II) exam and in the First Certificate in English (B2 First). With a qualitative document research approach, this study analyses these rubrics in order to determine to what extent they respect the criteria established by the CEFR.
As a result of globalization, policymakers and citizens are increasingly communicating in foreign languages. This article investigates whether communicating in a foreign language influences lay ...judgments of risk and benefit regarding specific hazards such as "traveling by airplane," "climate change," and "biotechnology." Merging findings from bilingual and risk perception research, we hypothesized that stimuli described in a foreign language, as opposed to the native tongue, would prompt more positive overall affect and through that induce lower judgments of risk and higher judgments of benefit. Two studies support this foreign language hypothesis. Contrary to recent proposals that foreign language influences judgment by promoting deliberate processing, we show that it can also influence judgment through emotional processing. The present findings carry implications for international policy, such as United Nations decisions on environmental issues.
The Anglicization of French and Romanian academic marketing discourse (official discourse of stakeholders in national education systems herby included) is a natural consequence of the global ...domination of English as vehicular language in science and technology, as well as in economics and in media: primary neology, especially in emergent domains (such as Internet, social networking, digital marketing etc.) takes place in English. English has become the global language of scientific research and several university programs are directly taught in English (in Romance language speaking countries) – hence a certain loss of domains for the latter. French and Romanian cultures are not equally equipped for defending their respective linguistic territories, with French institutions far more structured and efficient, even if language planning is quite present in our country also. Romanian linguists are not of one mind about Anglicization. And the loss of domains doesn’t seem to bother too much either the Romanian Academy nor the stakeholders in Romanian Education. This paper will only tackle the topics of specific patterns in French and Romanian academic marketing discourse and in the discourse of institutional decision makers in the university education system. After a short overview aiming at the contrastive approach to the notions of Anglicism and Anglicization (beyond the problem of national education’s linguistic governance, one should distinguish between Anglicization as anthropological process and Anglicisms as linguistic borrowings from English – loan words, semantic borrowings or syntactic borrowings), we will provide some results of an illustrative corpus research (a manually compiled comparable corpus of 50 French and 50 Romanian text samples in academic marketing, including samples of written discourse by university and national education decision makers). Pertaining to lexical/ (terminological) borrowings, we shall insist on their pervasive effects on native polysemy and synonymy, based on the analysis of the French family of synonyms management/administration/gestion (and their Romanian counterparts).
Writing is a complex process in which different sub-components both follow each other and interact with each other. Tracking and revising the text is a natural behaviour that helps the writer to ...shape the text in a desirable way - both in terms of its form and content. Previous studies of self-corrections by second language learners, for example, have shown that they most often correct spelling or formal, linguistic errors or that conceptual changes increase as language skills in the foreign language develop. This paper presents an analysis of online revisions with respect to the orientation of the corrections, i.e. typographical, linguistic and conceptual revisions. The texts were collected at the end of each semester during the first three years of language learning. The analysis has shown that, regardless of language level, foreign language learners in the study group focused most on the surface of the text, which was reflected in corrections of typographical errors. In addition, two revision patterns were observed: one characterised by a simultaneous focus on different dimensions when revising the text, while the other was characterised by a greater focus on one aspect of the text (usually typography), while the others received less attention.
Promoted as a series of resources aimed to “help learners develop effective and confident English communication skills” by encouraging them to invest effort in keeping “an open mind, a critical eye” ...and in having “a clear voice in English”, as indicated on the back cover of the books, the Perspectives set of study materials uses the same fresh approach to multilingual communication that National Geographic Learning has offered to its readers in the past few years.
The present study explores how 12- and 15-year-old immersion students (n=75 and n=73) produce subordinate questions in Swedish on a written test. Previous studies are sparse, but they report ...difficulties with both subject-verb word order and use of the subjunctor om and the subject marker som occurring in these clauses; informants with varying ages and competence levels struggle with similar problems. However, the acquisition order between these two types of constructions, a central theme in this study, has gained less attention. Analyses of the actual data show significant differences with varying effect sizes in accuracy between the different subcategories of subordinate questions and both informant groups. Insertion of grammatical words was mastered by significantly fewer informants than word order. Also, effect sizes were large in these contexts. Older informants do better than the younger ones, but the differences are not always statistically significant, as certain constructions are already mastered at a high level by the younger informants, whereas other constructions are still difficult for the older ones.
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