The details concerning the final models for frequency, MI score, and Log Dice are presented in Table 4a,b, Table 5a,b, and Table 6a,b, respectively. These three models showed several similarities. First, neither of the two proficiency measures (years spent studying French or EI score) significantly predicted the frequency or the strength of association of N+Adj combinations used. The same can be said about the placement type while abroad, which was not found to be significant in any of the models. Furthermore, the inclusion of the factor time was found to significantly improve only one model: MI score. The details for this model are provided in Table 5a, where we see positive parameter estimates for both in-stay and post-stay essays. This indicates that, when compared to the combinations produced at pre-stay, this group of learners was more likely to make use of combinations that enjoyed a higher level of co-occurrence strength as indicated by the MI score at the end of their year abroad and/or after their return to the United Kingdom. Because this variable has three categories, the model results in Table 5a do not specify whether this significant change concerns only the pre- versus in-stay comparison, only the pre- versus post-stay comparison or both. To more precisely pinpoint where significant development occurred, we carried out three pairwise *t-*tests using the observations from each time point and the residual standard error associated with the fit model. Before conducting these tests, we checked to make sure that the scores at each time point were normally distributed. We moreover applied the Bonferroni correction to our significance level, which resulted in an alpha level of 0.0033 (0.01/3). The three comparisons revealed that MI scores did not significantly change between pre- and in-stay (*p* = 0.1656) or between in- and post-stay (*p* = 0.0749). A significant change was however revealed when comparing MI scores for combinations produced at pre- versus those produced as post-stay (*p* = 0.0018). Figure 1 provides a visualization of the influence of time on co-occurrence strength, by mapping out the MI scores for each N+Adj combination at pre-, in- and post-stay.

**Table 4.** (**a**) Summary of final model for frequency. (**b**) Random effects for participant in the frequency model.

**Table 5.** (**a**) Summary of final model for MI score. (**b**) Random effects for participant in the MI score model.

**Table 6.** (**a**) Summary of final model for Log Dice. (**b**) Random effects for participant in the Log Dice model.

**Figure 1.** Fixed effect plot for the factor time (MI score model).

The final variable that we investigated was adjective position, and this variable proved to be significant in each of the three analyses, but with different patterns. In the case of frequency (Table 4a) and Log Dice (Table 6a), prenominal adjectives were significantly associated with higher frequency and with higher Log Dice scores, as is visible in the positive parameter estimates. The opposite was the case for the MI score analysis (Table 5a): Prenominal adjectives had a greater likelihood to result in combinations with lower MI scores than postnominal adjectives.

Finally, we explored the quality of our models. First, the calculation of R2 for the three models revealed that the inclusion of the random effect for participant always improved the fit of the model (i.e., conditional R2 is always greater than marginal R2 ): overall frequency of N+Adj combinations (marginal R2 = 0.266039, conditional R2 = 0.269053), MI score (marginal R2 = 0.047712, conditional R2 = 0.056071), and Log Dice (marginal R2 = 0.080451, conditional R2 = 0.082617). Second, the Bayesian Information Criterion indicated that all three final models offered a better fit of the data than the null model: frequency (final model: 2598.3, null model: 2899.1), MI score (final model: 4343.7, null model: 4360.5), and Log Dice (final model: 4355.6, null model: 4413.8).

#### **4. Discussion**

In commenting on research focused on language production, Arnon and Snider (2010, p. 67) observe that "findings show that language users are sensitive to detailed distributional information on many levels of linguistic analysis." Although their article is focused on production in one's native language, similar claims have been made for additional-language speakers (e.g., Ellis et al. 2015, 2016). However, the sensibility of additional-language speakers appears to differ in certain respects from that of native speakers. In particular, research has reported that additional-language learners show greater sensitivity to overall frequency in the input than to collocational strength. This sensitivity has been argued to be reflected in their overuse of high frequency word combinations, to the detriment of strongly associated ones. How a stay in a target-language community may reinforce or alter these tendencies has been explored by several researchers, who have tracked word combinations produced by learners over time to explore how they change (or not) in frequency and collocational strength. Overall, these studies have reported contradictory results. As we will see in what follows, the results from the current study contribute to these findings.

How do the frequency and collocational strength of N+Adj combinations used in written essays evolve both after an academic year spent in a target-language community and 8 months after the return home? Following Ellis et al. (2015), it is reasonable to expect that an immersion experience may facilitate phraseological learning, given that large amounts of input are necessary in order to encounter many phraseological patterns and that a stay abroad has the potential to provide such input. However, despite having spent an academic year in France, we noted little significant change with respect to the N+Adj combinations produced by the LANGSNAP learners. Beginning with overall frequency, the results from our linear mixed-effects analysis show that frequency was not significantly influenced by the factor time. Expressed differently, the 28 additional-language learners of French did not tend to use N+Adj combinations in the in-stay and the post-stay essays that were significantly more (or less) frequent than those used at pre-stay. While this result may reflect lack of sensitivity to overall frequency in the input, it may also be the case that these learners were already using high frequency N+Adj combinations and that this tendency was simply maintained during the stay abroad. Indeed, what little past research has shown change in frequency of phraseological units during a stay abroad has generally focused on lower-level learners (i.e., Siyanova-Chanturia 2015).

Turning to collocational strength, the two measures used—MI score and Log Dice returned different results with respect to change over time, meaning that evolution with respect to rare exclusivity (as detected by MI score) and by general exclusivity (reflected in Log Dice) were distinct in this dataset. Beginning with MI score, time was a significant and positive predictor, reflecting the fact that the N+Adj combinations used at post-stay were more likely to have higher collocational association scores than those used at pre-stay. Among previous research, only Siyanova-Chanturia (2015) reported significant changes in collocational strength at the group level, the other four studies having reported that MI scores remained static between the beginning and end of a stay abroad (Bestgen and Granger 2014; Li and Schmitt 2010; Siyanova-Chanturia and Spina 2020; Yoon 2016). Our own results reinforce this general trend, insofar as we found no significant change in MI score between N+Adj combinations produced before and at the end of a stay abroad. Interestingly, however, our analysis reveals change when the MI scores for combinations produced at pre-stay were compared with those produced 8 months after the participants' return to the United Kingdom. In other words, although no change was detected immediately at the end of the stay abroad, it may be the case that the stay in France initiated the

significant development that is visible after the participants' return to their home university. Little research currently exists that has included data that aim to examine evolution after the immersion experience. In the case of the LANGSNAP corpus, the final data-collection meeting took place about eight months after the learners' return to the United Kingdom, allowing researchers to investigate change or maintenance after a return home (see, for example, Huensch and Tracy-Ventura 2017, for an analysis of change in fluency in the Spanish portion of this corpus during and after the stay abroad). Importantly, the LANGSNAP research team has collected additional data three years after the end of the original project from a subset of the original participants.5 Exploring how phraseological patterns may have changed in the years that followed the stay abroad offers an exciting avenue for future research.

The significant finding with respect to MI score must be nuanced, however, by the results from the Log Dice analysis. Indeed, although both Log Dice and MI score are strength-of-association measures, for the Log Dice analysis, time was not a significant predictor. From a methodological point of view, the results from the two collocational strength measures provide support for the observations made by Gablasova et al. (2017) concerning the fact that the two measures reveal distinct information about phraseological patterns, because each favors different types of associations. With respect to the LANGSNAP data, the fact that change was observed in the MI score analysis but not the Log Dice analysis suggests that the observed evolution concerned items that enjoy rare exclusivity (i.e., word combinations involving infrequent words), as opposed to greater use of strongly associated combinations involving words from across the frequency spectrum. In combination, the MI score and Log Dice analyses thus allow us to more specifically pinpoint the types of combinations that underwent change. Moreover, when considered with respect to the results from the overall frequency analysis, we note that the LANGSNAP learners seem to present results that are distinct from what has been reported for additional-language learners: Instead of showing sensitivity to overall frequency, they show sensitivity (in the form of development) to strongly associated collocations. It may thus be the case that these learners have reached a point in their acquisition where frequency effects are not visible, at least with respect to the production of N+Adj combinations.

The second research question that guided this project focused on the factors that significantly influence the use of more or less frequent and more or less strongly associated N+Adj combinations. As the factor of time has already been addressed, we turn now to the four remaining independent variables that were explored. Of these, three were not significant in any of the analyses: EI score, years spent studying French, and placement type. The first two variables—EI score and years spent studying French—were both intended to reflect general proficiency in additional-language French. Given recent research by Siyanova-Chanturia and Spina (2020), in which proficiency level significantly influenced collocation use in additional-language Italian, we sought to explore whether one or both of these variables may influence N+Adj combination use in this dataset. The fact that neither was significant may indicate that the role of overall proficiency in collocation use is stronger among lower-level learners, like those who participated in Siyanova-Chanturia and Spina's study. As for placement type, our results detected no difference with respect to this variable. This finding contributes to evidence reported by Mitchell et al. (2015) on the oral development by these same learners. These researchers analyzed changes in EI score and in lexical diversity over time and found no significant impact of placement type. On the basis of their findings, they observed that "every placement type offers in principle a rich exposure to French and interactional opportunities" (p. 133). In the context of the current study, it thus appears that although teaching assistants, interns, and students may receive different kinds of input, these differences did not influence the frequency or collocational strength of N+Adj combinations that they produced.

5 French: https://slabank.talkbank.org/access/French/LANGSNAP3.html; Spanish: https://slabank.talkbank.org/access/Spanish/LANGSNAP3 .html.

The final variable that was investigated explored the importance of adjective position (prenominal vs. postnominal). This variable was found to be significant in all three analyses, indicating that adjective position influenced both the frequency and collocational strength of N+Adj combinations in this dataset, although two contrasting patterns were observed. More specifically, when the adjective preceded the noun, there was a greater likelihood that the resulting N+Adj combination would enjoy both higher frequency and a higher Log Dice score, whereas its MI score was more likely to be low. These different patterns held over time, given that adjective position was not found to interact with time in any of the analyses. An examination of the dataset reveals that the findings for adjective position reflect at least in part the difference in the type of adjectives that were used in these two positions. In particular, we note that the adjectives found in prenominal position tended to be more frequent (on average, they appear in the frTenTen12 WaCky corpus 4,752,332 times, or 481 times per 1 million words) than the set of adjectives that appeared in postnominal position (here, the average frequency is 662,642, or 67 occurrences per 1 million words). This difference helps explain why overall frequency and Log Dice are higher for combinations involving prenominal adjectives (which, on average, have higher overall frequency), whereas MI score—which favors rare exclusivity—tends to be higher for combinations including the generally less frequent postnominal adjectives. Whereas previous research, such as that of Granger and Bestgen (2014), has reported different collocational strength patterns as a function of type of word combination examined (e.g., N+N, Adj+N, adverb+Adj), the current investigation extends that finding by showing that syntactic patterns within a single category (in this case, word-order differences for N+Adj combinations) may also influence collocational profiles. Thus, when analyzing phraseological categories with syntactic variation, it is important to not assume that this variation has no impact on collocational patterns. In order to be able to account for the potential influence of such variation while also exploring other factors, researchers would do well to follow Gries' (2015) advice and consider the use of multivariate analytical approaches. As we have shown in the current analysis, multivariate analyses provide the researcher with a way to explore the influence of multiple factors simultaneously.

#### **5. Conclusions**

In this paper, we explored if and how one part of the phraseological spectrum changes over time, including an academic year spent in France. Documenting the influence of a stay abroad has attracted attention from numerous researchers, and the current analysis offers additional insight into changes (but also into stasis) as regards N+Adj combinations used in written essays. Whereas our results revealed no changes in frequency or in one of the collocational strength measures, we did observe significant change in the use of combinations receiving a high MI score. When the results from the Log Dice and MI score analyses are taken together, they allow us to affirm that the stay abroad ultimately led to the increased use of N+Adj combinations that involved less frequent words, as seen in the post-stay data. Although the findings provide another example of the learning trajectory during a stay abroad, when interpreted against the backdrop of past research, several avenues for future research remain open. These include, among others, exploring the role of length of stay and proficiency in the development of phraseological competence, as well as the potential variation in developmental paths as a function of category of phraseological unit (e.g., verb+N vs. N+Adj). Moreover, one of the main findings from research on phraseological competence in an additional language suggests a clear preference for high-frequency collocations over strongly associated ones. The results from the current study are unusual insofar as we find evidence of change in MI score, but not in overall frequency (or Log Dice), suggesting particular sensitivity to N+Adj combinations enjoying rare exclusivity on the part of the LANGSNAP learners. Presuming that this finding can be replicated in future research, this result may indicate that the learners who contributed to the LANGSNAP project were no longer sensitive to frequency effects for N+Adj combinations.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, A.E. and A.G.; methodology, A.E. and A.G.; formal analysis, A.E. and A.G.; writing—original draft preparation, A.E. and A.G.; writing—review and editing, A.E. and A.G. Both authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Ethical review and approval were not necessary for this study, as it was conducted on data drawn from a publicly available corpus.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Publicly available datasets were analyzed in this study. These data can be found here: [https://slabank.talkbank.org/access/].

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

#### **References**

Language Speakers. *International Review of Applied Linguistics and Language Teaching* 49: 1–26. [CrossRef]

Lorenz, Gunter. 1999. *Adjective Intensification—Learners versus Native Speakers*. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

## *Article* **Actual and Self-Perceived Linguistic Proficiency Gains in French during Study Abroad**

**Livia Dewaele 1 and Jean-Marc Dewaele 2,\***

2 Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication, Birkbeck, University of London, London WC1B 5DT, UK

**\*** Correspondence<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
**Abstract:** The present study focuses on 33 British and Irish students, including non-language specialists and language specialists, who spent their study abroad (SA) period in Francophone countries. Their proficiency in French ranged from lower independent (B1) to advanced level (C2). The analysis of quantitative data collected at the start, in the middle, and at the end of the SA period through an online questionnaire showed that both actual proficiency and self-reported proficiency increased significantly after SA. A closer look at self-reported proficiency in the four skills showed a significant linear increase in speaking and listening, while scores for reading and writing only increased significantly after the mid-way point in the SA period. The same pattern emerged for grammar and vocabulary. Only pronunciation showed no significant change over the SA period. Linking the amount of change in actual proficiency between the start and the end of the SA period to participants' descriptions of their experience revealed that progress was not always linked to overall positivity of the experience but rather to the development of a strong local French social network. Actual and self-reported proficiency scores were significantly correlated. Participants with lower initial actual proficiency were found to have made the biggest gain during SA.

**Keywords:** study abroad; proficiency; self-perceived proficiency; linguistic gains

#### **1. Introduction**

As the world has become more mobile and interconnected, the phenomenon of studying or working abroad during higher education has become increasingly common. Students have enthusiastically taken up the opportunity to go to another country: in the US, the Department of State reported that 325,339 US students studied abroad in the year 2015/16, constituting around 10% of enrolled students in the US1 . In Europe, the European Union's Erasmus+ programme has made study abroad (SA) increasingly accessible across the EU, which has led to a significant increase in participation. At its conception in 1987, 3244 students participated. In 2017/18, this figure stood at 325,000 students (European Commission 2018, p. 34). Around half of UK university students who studied abroad did so through Erasmus (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-47293927).

Not all Study Abroad (SA) has a foreign language element, but the present study will focus on SA where improving linguistic proficiency in a target language is the primary aim. The term "study abroad" is used throughout as an umbrella term for all activities undertaken by students while abroad, including internships and teaching assistantships.

While SA is commonly perceived to be a panacea for language students (Watzinger-Tharp 2014), research findings present a more nuanced picture. Research on SA in the context of second language acquisition began in the 1960s. Its initial focus was linguistic gain (Coleman 2009). Evidence of gain turned out to be less clear-cut than expected, with some studies reporting positive effects (Howard 2005; Segalowitz and Freed 2004;

**Citation:** Dewaele, Livia, and Jean-Marc Dewaele. 2021. Actual and Self-Perceived Linguistic Proficiency Gains in French during Study Abroad. *Languages* 6: 6. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/languages6010006

Received: 13 November 2020 Accepted: 21 December 2020 Published: 30 December 2020

**Publisher's Note:** MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

**Copyright:** © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

1 https://studyabroad.state.gov/value-study-abroad/study-abroad-data.

Regan et al. 2009), while others found limited or no effect (DeKeyser 1991; Isabelli-García 2006) compared to classroom-based language learning in the home institution. This led Collentine and Freed (2004) to conclude that there is "no evidence that one context of learning is superior to another for all students, at all levels of language learning, and for all language skills" (Collentine and Freed 2004, p. 164). Their conclusion reflects a shift in approach away from viewing SA as a single "monolithic construct" (Devlin 2013, p. 200), where linguistic progress is expected for all participants across the four skills and in all aspects of language (ranging from phonology to pragmatics), simply by virtue of being in a SA context.

One of the ongoing debates in SA research is the optimal timing for students to complete their SA. Do SA students need to have reached some proficiency threshold in order to benefit maximally from their SA (DeKeyser 2014; Hessel 2017; Lafford and Collentine 2006)?

Another question relates to the rate of development of different aspects of language. There is growing evidence that there is an imbalance between how phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, and pragmatics are affected by SA (Jensen and Howard 2014; Mitchell et al. 2017; Serrano et al. 2012).

One surprising finding in SA studies is the large amount of individual variation in proficiency outcomes in SA (Gass 2017; Jensen and Howard 2014; Kinginger 2008, 2011). Possible reasons are complex interactions between various learner-internal and learner-external independent variables, and pure chance. For example, Kinginger (2008) study of American students studying abroad in France took place at the time of the Iraq war, which was strongly opposed by the French and which forced the students who were often apolitical to defend the United States' geopolitical decisions. It led several students to avoid interactions with French people, restricting their opportunities to use French beyond mere service encounters. This was detrimental to their linguistic gains because, as Briggs Baffoe-Djan and Zhou (2021) point out, linguistic gain during SA depends as much on quantity as quality of language contact.

The current study responds to an ongoing need to measure the effectiveness of SA, both in terms of change in self-perceived and actual target language proficiency. It also answers the call issued by Mitchell et al. (2017) for more studies on target languages other than English, with French, for example, being "comparatively little studied" (Mitchell et al. 2017, p. 73).

The study looks at a relatively homogeneous group of 33 Anglophone students studying French as part of their degree at a British or Irish university, who filled out three successive online questionnaires in 2018–2019, at the start, in the middle, and at the end of their SA in a Francophone country.

#### **2. Literature Review**

#### *2.1. Early SA Research*

The investigation of the role of SA in second language acquisition began by seeking to understand "the overall efficacy" of SA as a language-learning context (Collentine 2009, p. 219). The first study to do so was Carroll (1967) study of 2782 American language students majoring in French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish at 203 universities in the USA. He found that students with a lower initial proficiency level made greater proficiency gains than students with higher initial proficiency and that students' spending time in the target-language-speaking country, compared to staying in the USA, was one of the best predictors of target-language proficiency gains. Further studies also found that SA was linked to proficiency gains: Brecht et al. (1993, 1995) conducted a longitudinal study of 658 American students in Russia, where they investigated a series of groups over several years at a number of Russian-language institutions. However, in contrast with Carroll, they found that higher scores on pre-departure reading and grammar tests predicted greater proficiency gains in most skills, such as speaking, listening, and reading. This led them to suggest that there might be a proficiency threshold that learners must reach to benefit

most from SA. It was also reported that individual differences, such as reading aptitude, predicted proficiency gains2 .

Barbara Freed, in her seminal 1995 (Freed 1995) overview of the field, underlined the need for more investigation of issues such as individual differences and for research to be conducted with more methodological rigour. This led to the expansion of the field of SA and the adoption of a wide variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, such as a new emphasis on gathering more qualitative and ethnographic data about participants (Dewey et al. 2013; Kinginger 2008, 2011; Moratinos-Johnston et al. 2021).

#### *2.2. SA and Language Proficiency*

Segalowitz and Freed (2004) study of 40 native English learners of Spanish in a SA versus at home (AH) context for one semester found that the SA cohort made significant gains in global oral proficiency, as measured by an Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI), whereas the AH cohort did not. They also noted "the importance of the dynamic interactions that exist among oral, cognitive, and contextual variables" (Segalowitz and Freed 2004, p. 173), which may help to explain why there is so much individual variation in learning outcomes.

SA has varying effects on different dimensions of language oral and written proficiency (Edmonds and Gudmestad 2018; Milton and Meara 1995). Pérez-Vidal and Juan-Garau (2011) found that SA led to improved use of formulas in oral performance and increased lexical complexity in writing. Moreover, the rate of gains varies across domains. Serrano et al. (2012) study of the oral proficiency of 24 Spanish students before, during, and after their SA in the UK found that significant gains were made in fluency and lexical diversity early on and that significant accuracy gains also emerged at the end of the year.

Fewer studies have looked at reading and written proficiency, and their results have been more variable (Pérez-Vidal and Barquin 2014; Pérez-Vidal and Juan-Garau 2009). Some studies did not find that SA had a positive effect on reading and writing. For example, DeKeyser (1990, 1991) found that the AH students in fact performed as well or better over the six-month period compared to the SA group on a grammar test, possibly because the onset level of proficiency in these students was below the "functional" level (DeKeyser 2014).

Kinginger (2008) measured the reading, listening, and grammatical comprehension of 23 American students before and after spending a year abroad in France. She found that 13 participants did not make any significant progress, with seven of these students actually scoring lower on reading proficiency after the SA period. However, other studies do report improvements in reading and writing performance after SA. In a series of studies of 18 Irish Anglophone students of French, Howard (2005) found that French past tense usage in the SA group was significantly more accurate than the AH group, producing the correct form in more than 90% of cases, compared to 75–84% of cases in the AH group. Similarly, Juan-Garau et al. (2014) conducted a study of 57 trilingual (Spanish–Catalan–English) university students as part of the Study Abroad and Language Acquisition (SALA) Project and found that students' gains in general written proficiency were significantly greater over the SA period compared with the period at university. Overall, results do generally point to a positive effect of SA on written fluency and syntactic and lexical complexity.

Mitchell et al. (2017) study of 56 British students' development in terms of general proficiency, fluency, accuracy, and complexity after completing their SA in Spanish-speaking countries (*n* = 27) and in France (*n* = 29) revealed striking differences between dimensions in oral and written speech (the LANGSNAP project). Lexical complexity and oral fluency increased fastest between Time 1 and Time 2, rising more slowly until Time 3. The authors were surprised to find very little improvement in accuracy after SA.

2 This issue has remained central in SA research, with DeKeyser (2007) referring to the need of a "functional level" and Collentine (2009) proposing the idea of a "threshold" level.

#### *2.3. SA and Individual Differences*

In addition to indications that SA affects various aspects of linguistic knowledge differently, it is clear that there is also immense individual variation in terms of language gains (Grey et al. 2015). It has been suggested that "study abroad intensifies individual differences in achievement" (Kinginger 2011, p. 58) because these differences affect the amount of input and interaction that a learner will have and will also affect the way in which input is processed (Sanz 2014). Personality plays a role, as highlighted in Arvidsson et al. (2018), as well as the arbitrary nature of the SA experience (Klapper and Rees 2012).

One crucial individual factor is students' proficiency level before they embark on SA. Lafford and Collentine (2006) suggest that initial proficiency may affect gains made abroad; having target language proficiency above a certain threshold may be necessary for measurable gains to be made. Intermediate learners, such as those in DeKeyser (1991) and Collentine (2004), may not yet have attained a level where they could move beyond basic communication. They may not yet have had a chance to automatize their existing declarative knowledge (DeKeyser 2014) and may thus have struggled in fast-flowing exchanges, especially if these happened in stressful circumstances with a lot of background noise, for example. Advanced learners have generally been found to make significant proficiency gains while abroad. Edmonds and Gudmestad (2018) looked at 20 advanced learners of French and assessed their use of correct gender marking over a 21-month period, which included a year abroad. They found a significant improvement between pre-stay and in-stay testing and concluded that the learners' high global and grammatical-gender proficiency pre-departure was key in allowing them to progress rapidly during their SA. Similarly, Leonard and Shea (2017) focused on 39 English L1 users learning Spanish in Argentina over a 3-month period. They found that those with higher levels of linguistic knowledge and faster processing speed in Spanish before departure made the greatest gains in accuracy and syntactic and lexical complexity during SA.

In contrast, Rees and Klapper (2007) reported of the 57 British foreign language students of German who spent their SA in Germany that those with higher initial proficiency level made fewer gains compared to those with lower initial proficiency levels. Similarly, Hessel (2017) longitudinal, mixed-methods study of 143 German university students who spent a semester abroad as part of the ERASMUS programme revealed that initial L2 proficiency was the strongest predictor of proficiency gain. Those with lower initial proficiency made greater gains. Considering the contradictory results of Edmonds and Gudmestad (2018) on the one hand and Rees and Klapper (2007) and Hessel (2017) on the other hand, the question about which learners may benefit the most from SA remains to be investigated.

There are also still a number of areas in SA research that need further investigation: numerous studies have investigated English L2 learners, but the work on French L2 development remains relatively limited (Mitchell et al. 2017). Further study of L2 skills other than oral fluency is also needed (Grey et al. 2015). A number of both dependent and independent variables also deserve further study, such as the effect of SA on advanced L2 learners and the development of both actual and self-perceived proficiency in a number of domains. The present study will attempt to contribute to our understanding of the complex and dynamic development of these variables in a SA context.

The following research questions were formulated:

(4) Does the relationship between actual and self-reported proficiency change between the start and end of the SA period? In other words, does the gap between objective and subjective measures narrow over time?

#### **3. Methodology**

In order to capture the complexity of SA outcomes, this study will adopt a longitudinal, mixed-methods approach, which Creswell (2015) defines as an approach where "the investigator gathers both quantitative (closed-ended) and qualitative (open-ended) data, integrates the two, and then draws interpretations based on the combined strengths of both sets of data to understand research problems" (Creswell 2015, p. 2). More specifically, it will be a convergent parallel design (cf. Creswell and Clark 2011, p. 70), in which quantitative and (some) qualitative data are collected in parallel. Therefore, in addition to the quantitative results, a sample of participant voices describing their SA experience will be included to allow a more nuanced interpretation of statistical findings. Dörnyei (2007) points out that "longitudinal research serves two primary purposes: to describe patterns of change, and to explain causal relationships" (Dörnyei 2007, p. 78). He expresses surprise at the scarcity of longitudinal studies in the field of Applied Linguistics, arguing that the use of mixed longitudinal designs is theoretically warranted, as they are "inherently concerned both with the micro and macro-levels of development and change (for example, individual growth and community change)" (Dörnyei 2007, p. 88). The method received ethical approval from the first author's Research Ethics Committee.

#### *3.1. Design*

Initial background information and information on participants' departure and return dates was collected well before departure. It determined the dates when participants were sent an invitation to participate in three further anonymous online questionnaires via email over the course of their SA. Participants completed the LexTALE test and the self-rated proficiency items before their departure (Time 1), they repeated the self-rated proficiency items when they were halfway through their stay in the Francophone country (Time 2), and they completed both the LexTALE and the self-rated proficiency items again after they had completed their stay in the Francophone country and had returned to their home country (Time 3) (see Table 1).

**Table 1.** Timing of the data collection.

#### *3.2. Participants*

The participants were 33 British and Irish university students from nine different research-intensive universities, who were completing a compulsory year abroad as part of their language studies. To preserve their anonymity, students were asked to create a unique identifier combining their initials and their university and to provide their email address so that they could be contacted later. Most were female (26 females, 7 males); aged 20 (mean age = 20.09); and most had English as their first language (*n* = 31). The majority were studying French as a joint major, often with another language such as Spanish (*n* = 6),

Italian (*n* = 4), German (*n* = 1), or with another subject such as Linguistics (*n* = 6), Business (*n* = 1), History (*n* = 1), Geography (*n* = 1), or Philosophy (*n* = 1).

Students were recruited via a personal email sent through the first author's Year Abroad office and through an open call on the mailing list of the Association for French Language Studies. Participants had been studying French for at least five years, and the mean length of study of French prior to departure was eleven and a half years. All spent between four and twelve months of their year abroad in a Francophone country (see Table 2). As a consequence, "Time 2" ranged from 2 months into SA to 6 months.

There was a fairly even spread in the activities undertaken by participants: ten studied, thirteen completed internships, eight worked as teaching assistants, and two both studied and completed an internship. Most (*n* = 30) went to France—other destinations were Switzerland (*n* = 1), French Guyana (*n* = 1), and New Caledonia (*n* = 1).

#### *3.3. Questionnaires*

In order to have an actual proficiency measure, LexTALE tests were administered to participants before their departure and upon their return from their SA (Time 1 and Time 3). The LexTALE test for French was developed by Brysbaert (2013), who followed the procedure used in the original LexTALE test for English (Lemhöfer and Broersma 2012). LexTALE is a visual lexical decision task for intermediate and advanced language learners. It has been shown to be a good predictor of vocabulary knowledge and to give a good indication of general linguistic proficiency (Lemhöfer and Broersma 2012), when compared with the longer, more thorough, Quick Placement Test and the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC). Lemhöfer and Broersma (2012) equate scores below 0.59 on LexTALE as corresponding to the lower independent users and lower-level descriptors of the Common European Framework (B1 and lower). LexTALE scores between 0.60 and 0.80 correspond to upper independent users (B2), scores between 0.80 and 0.90 correspond to lower advanced (C1) users, and scores above 0.90 correspond to upper advanced (C2) users. In the LexTALE French test, participants are presented with 56 French words of varying difficulty and 28 French-looking non-words, in a random order, and have to identify the real words (see Appendix A). The test has been found not to be at ceiling level even for L1 users (Brysbaert 2013) and so was deemed appropriate for use in this study. The same test was used both times, as this would allow direct comparison of scores. Given the significant time gap between the completion of each test (see Table 2), there was little risk of a training effect. Brysbaert (2013) instrument is popular among researchers who work on French L2 (Wetzel et al. 2020). The initial mean LexTALE score was 0.675.

To strengthen the reliability of the actual proficiency measure and to obtain a more granular view of participants' skills in French, we also added a set of self-reported proficiency items. Participants were asked to assess their own proficiency in reading, writing, speaking, listening, grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation, on a scale from 1 to 10 at Times 1, 2, and 3. Scores on the various dimensions were analysed individually and an average global score of self-reported proficiency was calculated. Internal consistency of the

seven items was excellent (Cronbach alpha = 0.873 at Time 1, Cronbach alpha = 0.874 at Time 2, and Cronbach alpha = 0.886 at Time 3).

At Time 3, participants were also asked to write between 200 and 250 words in French about their SA experience. They were invited to reflect on whether it had lived up to their expectations, mention some highlights and lowlights, to report on things about Francophone culture that surprised them, and to describe how they felt about going back to full-time study at their home university. This yielded a corpus of 13,855 words.

#### *3.4. Data Analysis*

The quantitative data were imported into SPSS 26. As most variables were not normally distributed (Kolmogorov–Smirnov values ranging from 0.098 to 0.262, *p* < 0.05), non-parametric statistics were used, including Spearman rank correlation analyses and Friedman tests, rather than repeated measures ANOVAs. Since *t*-tests tolerate moderate violations of their normality assumption rather well (Rosenkrantz 2008), a paired samples *t*-test was used to assess the change between two time points. A Friedman test was used to assess change over three time points for self-rated proficiency. Spearman rank correlation analyses were used to investigate the relationship between initial proficiency in French and the extent of the difference in actual proficiency between Time 1 and Time 3.

#### **4. Results**

#### *4.1. Quantitative Results for Actual Proficiency*

In order to answer the first part of the first research question, we ran a paired samples *t*-test. It revealed that the mean actual proficiency score for the whole group, as measured by the LexTALE test, increased significantly between Time 1 and Time 3: (*t*(32) = −5.181, *p* < 0.0001). Cohen's *d* was 0.80, which is indicative of a medium effect size (Plonsky and Oswald 2014) 3 (see Figure 1). In other words, students had moved, on average, from the lower range of upper independent users (B2) to the upper range of B2. −

**Figure 1.** Group mean for actual proficiency at Time 1 and Time 3 (\*\*\* *p* < 0.001).

3 Plonsky and Oswald (2014) suggest the following interpretation of Cohen's *d* values: "in the neighborhood of 0.40 should be considered small, 0.70 medium, and 1.00 large" (Plonsky and Oswald 2014, p. 889).

An actual proficiency difference score was calculated for each individual by subtracting their LexTALE score at Time 1 from their score at Time 3. The measure thus reflects the amount of change over the SA period. The mean score was 0.085 (SD = 0.09), with a range from −0.04 to 0.38. The relatively high standard deviation suggests that there was a large degree of inter-individual variation. The changes and amount of variation are shown in Figure 2. LexTALE proficiency scores decreased marginally for two students (−0.01 and −0.04), two made no measurable progress, and the remaining 29 made varying amounts of progress.

**Figure 2.** Changes in actual proficiency before and after the SA period, sorted according to the score at Time 1.

Figure 2 shows that the biggest increases emerged among those at the lower end of the LexTALE scale. This was confirmed by a Spearman rank correlation analysis that revealed a significant negative relationship between initial LexTALE scores and the difference score (*Rho* = −0.521, *p* < 0.0001). This is indicative of a medium to large effect size (Plonsky and Oswald 2014) 4 . In other words, participants with the lowest initial scores made the most significant progress, as is shown in Figure 3.

#### *4.2. Quantitative Results for Self-Reported Proficiency*

To answer the second part of the first research question, we ran a Friedman test. It also revealed a significant increase in self-reported proficiency between Time 1, 2, and 3 (*Chi*2 (32) = 17.9, *p* < 0.001). More detailed analyses (with paired *t*-tests) showed a nonsignificant increase between Time 1 and 2 (*t* = −1.53, *p* = 0.108, Cohen's *d* = 0.025) and a significant difference between Time 2 and 3 (*t* = 4.703, *p* < 0.001, Cohen's *d* = 0.431, which represents a small effect size). Figure 4 shows the increase in mean scores. In other words, it is only at the end of SA that students' scores started to increase significantly.

In order to obtain a more detailed understanding of which of the four skills and three linguistic domains of French increased most, we ran a series of Friedman tests (see Table 3). It shows a significant increase for all dependent variables from Time 1 to Time 3 except for pronunciation.

4 Plonsky and Oswald (2014) recommend the following benchmarks for the interpretation of effect size in correlation coefficients: "we suggest that *rs* close to 0.25 be considered small, 0.40 medium, and 0.60 large" (Plonsky and Oswald 2014, p. 889).

**Figure 3.** Scatterplot with regression line showing the relationship between initial LexTALE scores and the difference score after the SA period.

**Figure 4.** Self-reported proficiency scores from Time 1 to Time 3 (\*\*\* *p* < 0.001).

**Table 3.** Effect of SA on self-reported proficiency in four skills and three domains of French (Friedman tests).

Zooming in on the trends between the start and the end of the SA period, we used paired *t*-tests to look for differences between Time 1 and Time 2 and again between Time 2 and Time 3. It shows that only oral skills increased significantly both between Time 1 and Time 2 and again between Time 2 and Time 3 (see Table 4 and Figure 5). The other skills and domains did not change significantly between Time and Time 2 but did so between Time 2 and Time 3 (with the exception of pronunciation) (see Table 4 and Figure 6). This suggests that the development is non-linear, with a more pronounced change in the second part of the SA period. The effect sizes can be described as small for speaking between Time and Time 2 and again between Time 2 and Time 3. The effect size of the changes for writing and grammar is also small between Time 2 and Time 3 (Plonsky and Oswald 2014).

**Table 4.** Pairwise comparisons of self-reported proficiency in four skills and three domains of French between Time 1 and 2 and between Time 2 and 3 (paired *t*-tests with Cohen's d).

**Figure 5.** Mean scores for self-reported proficiency in the four skills at Times 1, 2, and 3 (*ns* non-significant, \* *p* < 0.05, \*\* *p* < 0.01).

**Figure 6.** Mean scores for self-reported proficiency in the three domains at Times 1, 2, and 3 (\* *p* < 0.05, \*\* *p* < 0.01).

In order to answer the final research question on the relationship between self-reported proficiency scores and actual proficiency scores, we ran a Spearman rho correlation analysis. A highly significant relationship emerged between participants' self-reported proficiency scores and LexTALE scores at Time 1 (*Rho* (32) = 0.43, *p* < 0.0001) and at Time 3 (*Rho* (32) = 0.56, *p* < 0.0001), which suggests good reliability of both measures.

#### *4.3. Qualitative Analysis*

Investigation of the qualitative data, in the form of reports from individual students after their SA, revealed unique patterns and possible reasons to explain why some students made significant progress while others did not. A varied sample of participant reports is presented here. These particular participants' reports were selected to represent the range of different proficiency levels and a range of changes in proficiency scores. The initial reports were made in French but have been translated into English here for ease of reading.

One student who made significant progress, despite having a high initial LexTALE score, was participant 26. She was a French, Spanish, and Portuguese student at the University of Cambridge and spent eight months studying in Paris. Her very high initial LexTALE score of 0.839 (C1 level) increased to a score of 0.981 (C2) (out of a possible 1.0), the highest score of the group. She reports that "My year abroad was one of the best years of my life" and that she is reluctant to return home and leave behind "all of the interesting people I met in Paris". She clearly integrated very well and made many French friends, which helped her still to make significant improvements to her French proficiency despite her very high initial score.

Another student, participant 10, who had a lower initial LexTALE score, equally made significant progress. She was a French and Philosophy student at Oxford University, had an initial score of 0.616 (the lower end of B2 level), but finished with a score of 0.741 (the higher end of B2 level). She worked as a teaching assistant in French Guyana for eight months. In her discussion of her SA, she mentions that she had previously found her French studies at university to be "painfully discouraging". However, on her SA, she made many Francophone friends and found "a new, positive attitude". While these students improved significantly and reported positive experiences, it was possible to improve without having a positive experience.

For example, participant 25, who studied French at Queen's University Belfast and spent ten months at the University of Poitiers, had a LexTALE score that increased from 0.527 (B1 level) to 0.902 (C2 level), despite describing her experience in France as being generally difficult and lonely. It thus seems that a positive experience is not essential for linguistic progress.

Participant 25: My year abroad did not go as expected. It was difficult and I often felt lonely. There were a few fun moments with friends, or when I went to visit some tourist sites . . . Altogether my year abroad wasn't great but I think I did improve my French.

However, not all students made significant progress: participant 31, who studied International Relations with French at the University of Portsmouth and spent 10 months studying in Lyon, made no measurable progress. His initial LexTALE score was fairly low at 0.527 (B1 level), and he had a slightly lower score of 0.518 after the SA period. He reports that "there was not much to do at the university", which suggests that he did not socialise much and may not have used French frequently enough to make progress in proficiency.

Equally, not all participants who had made little or no progress had low initial proficiency scores, as is demonstrated by participant 14. Her first language is Romanian and she studied Law and French at the University of Oxford. She spent 10 months at the Panthéon-Assas University, also referred to as the "Sorbonne Law School". Although she obtained a slightly lower score at Time 3 (C1 level) than at Time 1 (borderline C2 level), her LexTALE score is still one of the highest (Time 1 score: 0.892; Time 2 score: 0.848). She had lived in France for seven years before moving to the UK and has an advanced proficiency level in French. It would thus be wrong to interpret the lower score as a sign of "deterioration" in French proficiency. Her feelings about her SA are ambiguous:

Participant 14: I really enjoyed my year abroad. I missed my Oxford friends a lot, but I was able to visit them a lot, and I made a lot of new friends. One of the things I found the hardest was having to revise for exams twice a year. I can't wait to go back to Oxford as there are a few things I've been missing, but equally I don't really want to have my exams next year.

#### **5. Discussion**

The first research question asked how students' actual and self-reported proficiency changed after their SA. Both increased significantly. Most students were at the lower end of upper independent users (B2) in French before departing and progressed, on average, to the higher end of upper independent users (B2) in French. The highly significant increase in target language proficiency is similar to that reported by Hessel (2017) for German Erasmus students in the UK. Hessel found that her participants' English proficiency increased significantly during their first three months in the UK, a small effect size (*d* = 0.57) (Hessel 2017, p. 43). In fact, the effect size in the present study is larger (*d* = 0.80), possibly because the duration of the SA period was longer.

The global self-reported proficiency scores from Time 1, Time 2, and Time 3 demonstrated similar trends to the actual proficiency scores, with the effect size being larger between Time 2 and Time 3 than between Time 1 and Time 2. This was confirmed by looking at individual items for the four skills and the three domains. Speaking was the only skill to reach the threshold for a small effect size between Time 1 and Time 2 and again between Time 2 and Time 3. The increase for self-reported scores for writing and grammar reached a small effect size between Time 2 and Time 3. This reflects the findings by Mitchell et al. (2017) that progress is not always linear and that different skills and domains may develop at different speeds. The present investigation thus adds to the growing

#### evidence that SA boosts linguistic proficiency in areas other than oral proficiency (Rees and Klapper 2007; Juan-Garau et al. 2014; Mitchell et al. 2017; Hessel 2017; Edmonds and Gudmestad 2018).

There was considerable variation between students in terms of how much progress they made, with some not making any measurable improvement, while others made considerable gains. This is again consistent with the literature, where the amount of variation between individuals has long been identified as one of the main features of SA and for which no complete explanation has yet been found despite a long list of variables that explain some variance (Briggs Baffoe-Djan and Zhou 2021; DeKeyser 2014; Kinginger 2008; Mitchell et al. 2017).

The second research question dealt with the effect of initial proficiency on linguistic gains at the end of the SA period. A highly significant inverse relationship between initial proficiency and actual proficiency difference emerged in this study, where those with lower initial proficiency improved more. This deviates from the findings in Leonard and Shea (2017) but corroborates findings from other studies, such as Hessel (2017), where initial L2 proficiency was found to be the strongest predictor of L2 proficiency gain after the SA period. Edmonds and Gudmestad (2018) reported similar results and concluded that students' high global proficiency before departure was key to their progress. It must be noted that these results do not contradict the idea of a proficiency threshold above which learners are found to make the most progress (Lafford and Collentine 2006). As mentioned above, the students in this study are all "independent" to "advanced" users of French, who are above the proficiency threshold level (DeKeyser 2014).

The third research question focused on the potential of the qualitative data to shed light on potential causes of change in proficiency. It showed that for the majority of participants, SA had been a relatively mixed experience, which often defied previous expectations and where there were significant emotional highs and lows. A common refrain in participants' comments was that the year abroad did not go as planned (cf. Klapper and Rees 2012). For example, many participants reported that their universities had often been closed as a result of strikes, meaning that they therefore had far less exposure to French and French people than they had expected. They may have had the best of intentions, and gone with a very positive attitude, but they were denied the opportunity to build French social networks.

An interesting finding is also that the reported enjoyment, or the lack of it, did not always correlate with how much progress students made. Some students reported having a very positive experience and made significant progress, while others who had a positive experience made little progress. Correspondingly, some students who reported having less positive experiences made significant progress, and some who had less positive experiences made little progress. It would thus appear that other factors have more of an impact on proficiency.

While there was a confirmation of the general pattern that larger proficiency gains corresponded to a more positive SA experience and that there was a link between those with more limited linguistic gains and a negative experience, there were also a number of participants who deviated from this pattern. Participants whose actual proficiency had decreased between Time 1 and Time 3 had not necessarily regressed linguistically but had scores that were close to the ceiling level. Moreover, while those with lower initial proficiency did make the biggest proficiency gains, some participants with a high initial proficiency had also made significant gains by Time 3.

The picture that emerges is that besides the common trend—a general gain in actual and self-perceived proficiency—every participant had had a unique experience and mixed feelings. Some participants enjoyed many aspects of their SA but not necessarily all of them, while others did not enjoy the experience overall but did appreciate certain aspects, such as tourism (which is reminiscent of certain participants in Kinginger (2008) study). Some participants made many French friends, even boyfriends, while others were isolated or only had Anglophone friends; some did not want to leave France after SA, while others could not wait to go back and re-integrate into campus life at their home

university. These findings confirm Kinginger (2008, 2011); Devlin (2013); Mougeon and Rehner (2015); Mitchell et al. (2017), and Briggs Baffoe-Djan and Zhou (2021) observations that engagement with the host environment—and both quantity and quality of language contact—are key to linguistic progress. In other words, the individual's role is central.

The qualitative data showed that some participants found a way to develop new social networks with Francophones or to establish close relationships with Francophones, while others floundered and fell back on their existing Anglophone networks. It is likely that some were better equipped psychologically to overcome the adversities that they were facing. If experience affects proficiency outcomes, this variability of experience between participants helps to explain why there is so much variation in outcomes between participants. It does confirm Howard (2021) observation that learners need "to be active participants in contributing to shaping their language contact opportunities and general experiences" (Howard 2021, p. 7).

The relationship between actual and self-reported proficiency at the start and end of SA was the focus of the fourth and final research question and was an opportunity to test the reliability of both measures. The correlation value between both measures was highly significant both times but it was even higher at Time 3 than at Time 1. This could be attributed to a more accurate judgment of French proficiency. Before their departure, participants would typically have compared their performance with that of their peers and teachers. After the year abroad, they had accumulated multiple daily opportunities to compare their performance with that of L1 users and foreign language users around them, allowing them to judge their performance more accurately.

The current study is not without limitations. Only 33 out of the initial 54 participants provided data three times. Attrition is a well-known problem in longitudinal studies (Dörnyei 2007) and it is particularly hard to obtain data during SA when participants have a lot on their mind. As a consequence, there is a risk that those who failed to complete the second and third survey may have had a slightly different profile and SA experience from those who did complete the three surveys. In other words, our 33 participants may have a unique profile and may therefore not be representative of the whole cohort.

#### **6. Conclusions**

The present study sought to measure the effect of SA in Francophone countries on both actual and self-reported French proficiency of British and Irish students. The results show that both actual proficiency and self-reported proficiency increased significantly after SA.

Because data for self-reported proficiency had been collected three times, it emerged that the increase was more linear for speaking and listening than it was for reading and writing, with the significant increase occurring after the SA mid-way point. The same pattern was found for grammar and vocabulary. The only domain where no significant change occurred over the SA period was pronunciation. Linking change in actual proficiency between Time 1 and Time 3 to participants' descriptions of their SA revealed a clear disconnect between progress and the overall positivity of the experience. Some students who had struggled actually made good progress. The establishment of a local French social network emerged as an important factor and random events such as university strikes were linked to limited progress.

Participants with lower actual proficiency at Time 1, namely lower and upper independent users (B1 and B2), were found to have made the most significant progress during SA.

To conclude, SA provides students with opportunities to boost their linguistic skills in parallel with a strengthening of their resilience in the face of loneliness and occasional adversity. It seems that the decision to actively take control and shape the SA experience was more likely to lead to linguistic progress than the mere enjoyment of the experience.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, L.D. and J.-M.D.; methodology, L.D. and J.-M.D.; formal analysis, L.D. and J.-M.D.; investigation, L.D. and J.-M.D.; resources, L.D.; writing—original draft preparation, L.D. and J.-M.D.; writing—review and editing, L.D. and J.-M.D. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** The study was conducted according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki, and approved by the Social Sciences and Humanities Inter-divisional Research Ethics Committee of the University of Oxford (R52027/RE001) and date of approval.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

**Data Availability Statement:** The data presented in this study are openly available on Researchgate, DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.27929.65123.

**Acknowledgments:** We would like to thank the participants and Sandra Kotzor who supervised Livia's BA dissertation at the University of Oxford.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

#### **Appendix A**

#### LexTALE\_FR

abêtir, agire, alourdir, amadouer, amorce, balai, bouilloire, boutard, bouton, caddie, cadenas, canoter, capeline, cerveler, cessure, chameau, cheveux, cintre, citrouille, cloche, clouer, crayon, dauphin, détume, écorché, écouce, écureuil, église, endifier, ennemi, escroc, esquif, éventail, fascine, fenêtre, fosse, fouet, fourmi, gloque, hache, honteur, huif, inciter, indicible, infâme, jamain, joueux, lanière, lézard, mappemonde, marteau, metter, mignon, nouer, occire, œillet, oeuiller, orgueil, osseaux, panier, parchance, parir, peigne, pinceau, plaiser, pouce, pourcine, prioche, procoreux, racaille, raplaner, rejoute, remporter, réporce, retruire, robinet, sacher, salière, semonce, sentuelle, soumon, tanin, treillage, vicelard.

#### **References**

## *Review* **Input Issues in the Development of L2 French Morphosyntax**

**Anita Thomas**

Department of Multilingualism and Foreign Language Education, University of Fribourg, CH-1700 Fribourg, Switzerland<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
**Abstract:** The aim of this article is to discuss the role of input characteristics in the development of French verb morphology. From a usage-based perspective, several cognitive and linguistic factors contribute to the ease or difficulty of processing input in L2 acquisition. This article concentrates on frequency, salience, and form–function association, factors that might influence what aspects of input are available to the learners' attention. A presentation of French verb morphology from this perspective shows how these factors can contribute to the use of the regular -*er* verb paradigm as a default. A review of empirical studies confirms the influence of input characteristics. The results suggest that the dominant pattern of regular verbs and the scarcity of salient clues from irregular verbs contribute to the specificity of L2 French development. The conclusion addresses the question of enriching L2 classroom input with irregular verbs. Such an input could facilitate the perception of form–function association, and thus, contribute to a more efficient development of French verb morphology. The article concludes by suggesting other ways of studying the influence of input as well as avenues for future research.

**Keywords:** input; SLA; French; morphosyntax; frequency; usage-based approaches

**Citation:** Thomas, Anita. 2021. Input Issues in the Development of L2 French Morphosyntax. *Languages* 6: 34. https://doi.org/10.3390/ languages6010034

Received: 20 November 2020 Accepted: 16 February 2021 Published: 23 February 2021

**Publisher's Note:** MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

**Copyright:** © 2021 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

#### **1. Introduction**

This contribution to the special issue on the acquisition of French will focus on the role of input in the development of L2 French. This area of research has received a great deal of attention during the last 20 years. Studies have mainly been conducted within the usage-based approach, an approach that posits a close relationship between the language to which the learners are exposed and its representation as observed in learner production (Barlow and Kemmer 2000; Gass 2015). The work of Nick Ellis and colleagues has highlighted the interaction between cognitive factors, especially attentional processes, and linguistic factors, i.e., input characteristics of the target language, to explain the ease or difficulty of acquisition of a specific structure (Ellis 2006; Ellis et al. 2016). In this view, input is not the raw language found in native speakers but language as processed (Ellis 2006, p. 179). Accordingly, a target language does not appear to L2 learners as it is described in grammar books but rather in terms of input to L2 learners. This way of looking at language is important as a contribution to the understanding of L2 acquisition and even more to the improvement of L2 teaching.

Cognitive approaches to L2 acquisition have shown that working memory and cognitive processes related to attention play a crucial role in language processing and learning. Schmidt (2001) presented the basic assumptions of attention, which, besides controlling access to consciousness, is also limited and selective. His assertion that "SLA is largely driven by what learners pay attention to and notice in target language input and what they understand the significance of noticed input to be." (Schmidt 2001, pp. 3–4) is commonly accepted today (Ellis et al. 2016, p. 23).

Another important factor is of course the linguistic routines established in the L1 (and other well-mastered languages). The L1 plays a crucial role in the perception of the target language; L2 acquisition is "shaped by the L1" (Ellis 2006, p. 164).

In this contribution, I will mainly focus on linguistic factors that interact with the attentional processes, making a specific phenomenon of the target language more or less available to the focus of attention, and thus, more or less available as input to the learner. Some of these factors are presented in the next section. Section 3 provides an introduction to French verb morphology. Section 4 provides a review of some studies that have examined the role of input in L2 French, especially in the acquisition of French verb morphology. Section 5 is devoted to a short conclusion and suggests other methods for studying the influence of input.

#### **2. Linguistic Factors and Input Characteristics**

This section is devoted to a short introduction of some linguistic factors that contribute to input processing: frequency, salience, and form–function association.

The factor input frequency is based on two types of calculations: token and type frequency (Bybee 2008). Token frequency corresponds to the number of occurrences in a given text, whereas type frequency corresponds to the number of items that participate in the same pattern, the number of items "that can fill a slot in a particular construction" (Behrens and Pfänder 2016, p. 9). These two ways of calculation tell us how often a linguistic item appears in the input (Ellis et al. 2016, p. 52).

Token frequency allows for the comparison of the frequency of different items, such as specific lexical items, lemmas, or morphemes in a given text or corpus. Token frequency has an effect on the level of lexical strength and of availability in memory of an item. The lexical strength of an item refers to its level of autonomy or connection to related items (Bybee 1995, 2008), for example the present tense "is" in relation to the infinitive "be." Importantly, the dominance of one form over other forms is not restricted to irregular paradigms; rather, it is the contrast between two or more forms in terms of token frequency that determines dominance.

Type frequency, on the other hand, has an effect on the productivity of a given pattern; a productive pattern might be used on novel items (Bybee 1995, p. 430). In L2 language acquisition, type frequency could explain the overextension of a given pattern on others, for example, the use of the regular past participle -*é* on irregular verbs such as *prendre* 'take,' which results in the production of *pren[e]* or *prend[e]* instead of *pris*. Type frequency is sometimes seen as the critical mass of input needed to acquire a specific pattern (Paradis 2010).

Another factor is salience, which is the degree to which an item "stands out relative to its context" (Ellis et al. 2016, p. 47). For this article, the most important issue is the low salience of grammatical function words and morphemes in L2 learning. Highly frequent function words, such as auxiliaries, may go unnoticed because of their phonological and semantic characteristics: they are unstressed and often perceived as redundant (for example, in the case of a compound past tense, the pastness is already given in an adverb or in the past participle). This results in incorrect productions of subject + non-finite form constructions (e.g., *je parl[e]* or *je vu*).

A third important factor is the form–function association (Ellis 2006; Ellis et al. 2016). This factor refers to the level of systematic association between a specific form and a specific function, or how reliably a specific morpheme is associated to a specific function. It can also be described in terms of probability: what is the probability that morpheme x corresponds to function y? The issue here concerns homophony and polyfunctionality. For example, the morpheme *-s* has many grammatical functions in English, including: 3rd person singular, 'he books a flight'; possessive, 'the book's cover'; and plural, 'three books.' This morpheme is a reliable plural marker, but it is not restricted to that function. This makes the *-s* marker ambiguous, thus necessitating a larger context for disambiguation and interpretation.

Finally, semantic and distributional properties also play a role in input characteristics, although they are closely related to the factors mentioned above. For example, the aspect hypothesis is based on the distribution of past tense morphology according to the verb's

semantic (lexical) aspect. In this view, the frequent association of imperfective with state verbs will make this association salient in the input to the learners (Andersen 2002).

These factors allow us to formulate hypotheses about the ease or difficulty with which a given item may be encountered, noticed, and possibly learned in L2 acquisition, since they reflect the regularities and irregularities in a given language. Research in psycholinguistics has shown that "language processing is sensitive to the statistical regularities of language experience at every level of structure" (Ellis et al. 2016, p. 279). Goldschneider and DeKeyser (2001) and Collins et al. (2009) are examples of studies that test the influence of input characteristics on the order of acquisition of L2 English. They both show that these characteristics "explain a substantial amount of acquisition difficulty" (Ellis 2006, p. 173).

A general hypothesis about the longitudinal development of French L2 morphosyntax was developed some time ago by Bartning and Schlyter (2004). It appears that French verb morphology is a challenge even at advanced stages (Bartning et al. 2009). As Prévost puts it, "adults learning L2 French seem to struggle with inflectional morphology" (Prévost 2009, p. 83). There is very little research about the role of French input characteristics on this L2 French developmental path, but there are some studies that address specific morphological issues. They will be reviewed after the next section, which will present French verb morphology.

#### **3. French Verb Morphology**

This section is devoted to an introduction to French verb morphology and a discussion of its characteristics in terms of L2 learner input.

Traditionally, French verb morphology is portrayed as illustrated in Figure 1. It seems that there is one specific form for each grammatical person in each tense. In the past, learners of French had to know these paradigms by heart and be able to recite *je lis, tu lis* . . . .

**Figure 1.** Conjugation table of the verb lire 'to read' on le conjugueur (https://leconjugueur.lefigaro. fr/conjugaison/verbe/lire.html, accessed on 20 February 2021).

French verb conjugations are categorized as regular or irregular and grouped according to the form of the infinitive. The relationship between the infinitive and the other forms is usually emphasized in conjugation tables. For example, the very popular tool le conjugueur (https://leconjugueur.lefigaro.fr, accessed on 20 February 2021), edited by the French newspaper Le Figaro, underlines that grouping the verbs according to the infinitive form will facilitate the memorization of the morphological endings1 . The verbs are distributed into three groups (https://leconjugueur.lefigaro.fr/frlesgroupes.php, accessed on 20 February 2021), the first being those ending in *-er*, except *aller*, the second being those ending in *-ir* for which the present participle ends in -*issant* (like *finir*), and the third group being all other verbs, labeled as "irregular." This third group is again split into four subgroups: verbs ending in *-ir,* verbs ending in *-oir*, and verbs ending in *-re*. The verb *aller* is in a subgroup of its own.

However, contrary to le conjugueur's claim, except for the group of -*er* verbs, the relationship between the infinitive and other forms is unpredictable, even though there are some recurrent patterns, as illustrated in (1) with two irregular verbs.

The attentive reader will notice that verbs ending in -*ir* appear sometimes as regular (±300 verbs) and sometimes as irregular (±100 verbs). A closer look at verbs in these groups reveals how arbitrary these delimitations can be. As illustrated in Table 1, the number of similarities between many of these verbs is striking. This distinction between regular and irregular verbs ending in -*ir* might be confusing for L2 learners.

Moreover, from a morphological point of view, the distinction between "regular" and "irregular" is intricate in French. In fact, the morphemes corresponding to a specific tense, for instance *imparfait* or future tense, are the same for all verbs, as shown in Table 2. The irregularity lies in the stem alternation but not in the endings; for a discussion, see (Meunier and Marslen-Wilson 2004, p. 574ff.).

**Table 2.** Examples of stem alternation and regular endings.

1 Les groupes sont un bon moyen de catégoriser les verbes pour retenir plus facilement leurs terminaisons.

From a usage-based approach, "regularity" has to do with the number of items participating in a similar schema; in other words, with the kind and strength of frequency that applies to the verb. From this point of view, there are three main groups of verbs in French:

In order to discuss the role of salience and form–function association in the acquisition of L2 French verb morphology, it is important to stress the significant differences between the number of different forms in written and spoken modes. For example, for the verb *lire* in present tense singular (Figure 1), the forms are distinguished orthographically as *lis* and *lit*, but they are homophonous in spoken language and both pronounced /li/. In French, the relationship between sounds and letters is opaque. Written and spoken French can practically be considered as two different languages. This difference creates difficulties for all learners of French, both L1 (written) and L2 alike; for example, see (Fayol and Jaffré 2008).

French spoken verb morphology is strongly characterized by homophony. Homophony is especially frequent in the -*er* verbs and affects the most basic forms used in spoken French, as illustrated in Table 3 with the example of the verb *donner* 'to give.' For these verbs, there is one form for the present tense singular and 3rd person plural and one form for the present tense 2nd person plural, the infinitive, the past participle, and the *imparfait* (imperfective past) (Walter 1982 for the similarity between [e] and [ε]). Hence, the non-finite forms and two past tense forms are consistently expressed with a form ending in [e]. In other words, there are two main forms for the regular verbs: one for the present tense (which is also the base form, on which the other forms are constructed) and one for the non-present tense. It is important to recall that the use of the 1st person plural is quite rare outside the French language classroom and usually replaced by the impersonal 3rd person singular *on* 'one' (Giroud and Surcouf 2016). The opposition between present versus non-present tense could be so salient both semantically and phonologically that it overshadows other phonologically perceivable oppositions up to an advanced level of proficiency.

For comparison, Table 3 also presents the forms for the irregular verb *lire* 'read.' Unlike the regular -*er* verbs, the differences between the various forms of an irregular verb are phonologically distinctive, and, as already mentioned, the relationship between the infinitive and the other forms is unpredictable for most of the irregular verbs.

Another important difference between regular and irregular verbs is that the 3rd person plural is distinct from the 3rd person singular in many irregular verbs. However, the homophony between the 2nd person plural and the *imparfait* applies to all verbs except a few (namely, *être* 'be,' *dire* 'say,' and *faire* 'do').

**Table 3.** Main forms in spoken and written French with the examples of *donner* 'give' and *lire* 'read.'

In conclusion, the strong pattern of the regular -*er* verbs meets all the criteria as a candidate for a default pattern that might be used on other less frequent patterns (and verbs): the pattern has a high type frequency and the difference between the main present tense forms and the other forms is highly salient as well as consistent and reliable on the level of form–function associations. How this morphological system impacts the development of L2 French verb morphology is the subject of the next section.

#### **4. Effects of French Input and the Development of L2 French Verb Morphology**

This section is devoted to a review of studies that have addressed the influence of input on different aspects of the French morphological system in L2 acquisition: (1) the use of default forms in the present tense and infinitive contexts, (2) the development of the 3rd person plural, and (3) the development of the past tense.

#### *4.1. Default Forms in L2 Spoken French*

As described in the previous section, the pattern of -*er* verbs consists of two main forms, a 'short' form corresponding to the present tense and a polyfunctional 'long' form resembling the infinitive ([e] form). Example (2) (Thomas 2009, p. 12) illustrates the correct and incorrect use of the two forms, both in a present tense context (2a and c) and in an infinitive context (2b and d). The use of these forms as default forms in L2 French (spoken) production has been reported in many studies (e.g., Bartning and Schlyter 2004; Perdue 1993; Prévost 2009; Prévost and White 2000). They indicate that L2 learners' production is characterized by variability.

In her research on the influence of input in L2 acquisition at beginner/intermediate levels, Thomas (2009) addressed the question whether there is any systematicity in the production of these forms or whether it is arbitrary. She developed two hypotheses that posit a relationship between input and learner production. The first hypothesis was based on a traditional preexisting semantic categories approach in which the lexical aspect of the verbs would influence the input treatment and the learners' production. According to this hypothesis, specific forms are more relevant to the inherent lexical/semantic aspect of the verbs than others (see the *Aspect Hypothesis*, Andersen 2002; Andersen and Shirai 1994). The learners will first produce the forms that correspond to the prototypical lexical aspect

of the verbs: present tense forms for the stative verbs (verbs that describe a state, e.g., *be, live in, like, love*) and past tense forms for the dynamic verbs (verbs that describe an action, e.g., *work, buy, win a race*).

Thomas' second hypothesis was based on a usage-based approach, according to which the learners will produce the most frequent form of a given verb in the input (Bybee 1995, 2008).

The study concentrated on infinitive and present tense for 12 common regular -*er* verbs. The frequency of forms of these verbs in the input was established empirically with data from a range of spoken French corpora that reflected the different kinds of French language to which the learners could be exposed:

The compilation included all the forms presented in Table 3 (above). The results showed a strong overlap between the two hypotheses in the input data. The stative verbs were very frequent in the present tense form, while the dynamic verbs were frequent in the [e] form, an opposition that had previously been documented in most studies on lexical aspect in French (e.g., Labeau 2005). The only way to differentiate between the two hypotheses was found in the dynamic verbs that were equally frequent in both forms in the input data. The predictions from the two hypotheses are presented in Table 4.

**Table 4.** Predictions for the L2 production in the imitation test in Thomas (2009).

These two hypotheses were tested in an experimental design, including an imitation test. In this test, every verb was presented in the middle of a grammatical sentence, once in the present tense (*parle*) and once in the infinitive (*veut/va parler*). The learners had to listen to the pre-recorded sentence, count from one to ten in French in 4 s (a suppression task to avoid parroting), and then repeat the sentence they had heard. They were encouraged to say all that they remembered, even if it was only part of the sentence that they had heard. The test was administered to 33 Swedish upper secondary school learners of French at beginner-intermediate level.

The results are summarized in Figure 2. The bars show the results for each group of verbs. Overall, the learners produced many more present tense forms (78%) than infinitives (22%), a result that reflects a preference for the former. This massive transformation of the items presented in the infinitive into present tense was not expected and was interpreted as an influence of input, since classroom "beginner talk" is mainly about the here and now.

ʁ **Figure 2.** Production of the present tense form (e.g., /paKl/) and the form ending in [e] in the imitation test within the different groups of verbs. Caption: V: verb; Freq: frequent; prs sg: present singular and 3rd plural; F: forms.

Figure 2 shows that the learners did not simply repeat all the test items. If this were the case, the result would have been 50% for all three groups of verbs2 . Instead, for the (stative) verbs frequent in the present tense form in the input, the learners produced the present tense form even after a stimulus with a form ending in [e]. This is exemplified in (3): the same learner produced the same form regardless of the form (and the syntactic context) presented in the stimulus. For these verbs, we cannot differentiate the potential effect of lexical aspect or input frequency. The two factors overlap in the input as well as in the L2 learners' production.

Similarly, at the other end of the continuum (the third bar in Figure 2), for the verbs frequent in the [e] form, a form ending in [e] was produced even after a stimulus presented with the present tense form as illustrated in (4). Unlike the transformation into present tense as in (3), where the subject was directly followed by the most frequent form of the verb, resulting in a correct present tense sentence, the absence of the semi-auxiliary in (4) results in an incorrect sentence. This can be seen as confirmation of the hypothesis that L2 learners produce the most accessible form, which corresponds to the most frequent form for a particular verb, regardless of the syntactic context. In other words, although the present tense form resembles a finite form, and the [e] form a non-finite, the status of these forms could be the same: that of a default form. However, for the dynamic verbs frequent in the [e] form, there was again a strong overlap with respect to lexical aspect and the frequency of forms in the input and in the L2 learners' production.

2 Since the research question was concerned with the form produced regardless of the syntactic context, the syntactic match with the form was disregarded. Nevertheless, 87% of the present tense forms were produced in the syntactic context for such a form as opposed to only 37% of the forms in [e].

Finally, the results for the dynamic verbs frequent in both forms in the input show that the verbs were not produced according to what was expected by the hypothesis based on the verbs' lexical aspect. Instead, the learners still produced these verbs more often in the present tense form, though to a lesser extent than with the stative verbs frequent in the present tense form in the input. Example (5) illustrates the variation in the production of these verbs. It is interesting to observe that the verbs with more variation in the input were also produced with more variation by the learners, this time not only on a form level but also on a syntax level. Unlike the two other kinds of verbs, the semi-auxiliary (*veut/va*) was sometimes produced, resulting in mismatches on the surface form level.

Overall, the results of this experimental study show an influence of the frequency of the surface forms in the input on the learners' production of the verb forms in this task, regardless of the syntactic context. A clear limitation of this study is that it only considered the group of regular -*er* verbs and, consequently, the influence of two forms.

#### *4.2. The Development of Third Person Plural Forms*

As mentioned in Section 3, there is no audible difference between the 3rd person singular and plural for the -*er* verbs, except in the cases where a verb beginning with a vowel is preceded by a subject (typically *ils/elles*) where the liaison between the subject and the verb is obligatory. However, the difference between 3rd singular and plural is visible in the written forms, with an -*nt* at the end of the form (*il parle* 'he speaks' and *ils parlent* 'they speak,' but both are pronounced /paKl/). The difference between the singular and plural forms is also audible in the four frequent and irregular verbs *être* 'be,' *avoir* 'have,' *aller* 'go,' and *faire* 'do,' for which two completely different suppletive forms are used (*est–sont* 'is–are,' *a–ont* 'has–have,' *va–vont* 'goes–go,' and *fait–font* 'does–do'). Finally, there is also a phonological difference between 3rd singular and plural for the irregular verbs with stem alternation (*veut–veulent* 'wants–want'). However, this difference is often phonologically not salient. In summary, there are four patterns/schemas of relationship between 3rd person singular and plural in spoken French as presented in (6) (Ågren 2017, p. 9).

In her experimental study, Ågren (2017) addressed the question of the role of input frequency on the production of subject–verb agreement in 3rd person singular and plural. The study concentrated on six verbs with stem alternation (pattern 4 above). The frequency of the two verb forms was checked in two reference corpora of spoken French: in the corpus of French phonology (https://www.projet-pfc.net, accessed on 20 February 2021) and in C-ORAL-ROM (Cresti and Moneglia 2005), as well as in the corpus of written language Lexique 3 (http://www.lexique.org, accessed on 20 February 2021). For all verbs, it appeared that the 3rd person singular was much more frequent than the 3rd person plural (Ågren 2017, p. 13). The difference was stronger for the verbs with higher token frequency; for these verbs, the proportion of 3rd person plural was around 10% (e.g., *dire* 'say' and

*pouvoir* 'can'), while for the less frequent verbs, it could be up to 27% (e.g., *comprendre* 'understand' and *mettre* 'put'). In other words, according to the data from these corpora, the 3rd person plural is characterized by low frequency in both spoken and written French.

The results of the study are based on an imitation test taken by 42 Swedish university student learners of French at different CEFR levels (10 at A1, 10 at A2, 11 at B1, and 11 at B2 according to a Dialang test https://dialangweb.lancaster.ac.uk, accessed on 20 February 2021) and by a control group of 21 francophone exchange students. The six irregular verbs were presented four times each, twice in singular and twice in plural, once with subject–verb agreement (*la fille boit* 'the girl drinks,' *les amis boivent* 'the friends drink') and once with a subject–verb mismatch (*la fille boivent* 'the girl drink,' *les amis boit* 'the friends drinks'). Generally, the singular form was repeated more often by the learners, both in the grammatical and the agrammatical context, which reflects the frequency of the two forms in French and suggests that the 3rd person singular is used as default. Additionally, the number of correct imitations in the matching contexts for both forms increased with higher levels of proficiency. The learners with higher CEFR levels in French had more success, which is also an input effect in the sense that less salient phenomena need more experience in terms of exposure and practice in order to be learned (Ågren et al. 2014). However, there was no correlation between the token frequency of the different verbs and the level of correct imitation. In conclusion, the results suggest that learners overuse the pattern of the regular *-er* verbs on other verbs and that there is a tendency to use only one form for a given verb. This result could also be due to an influence of the learners' L1 (Swedish), which has only one form for the present tense for each verb (even the most frequent ones).

The absence of correlation with the token frequency of each specific verb could also be due to problems with the representativeness of the chosen corpora as input to the learners. This is a major issue in studies looking at the influence of input. The direct relationship between the approximate input as computed with corpora and the effective input to the learners is difficult to establish; for a discussion, see (Thomas and Ädel 2021). Indeed, it is probably an impossible task for adult learners of a language such as French and at a level other than beginner. In fact, to study the close relationship between input and output, either studies using artificial language, for example (Madlener 2018), or first exposure studies (Dimroth 2018) are necessary.

Another issue is the level of salience of the contrast between the 3rd person singular and plural forms. With subject pronouns, the contrast *il/ils* 'he/they-masc' and *elle/elles* 'she/they-fem' is only audible when the verb begins with a vowel. With nominal subjects, the contrast is with the article, which is well contrasted for the indefinite article *un-une* 'a' vs. *des* 'several' but less so for the definite article *le* vs. *les* because of the difficulty in perceiving the difference between [@] and [e]. Given the low number of verbs with stem alternation and the very high type frequency of the regular -*er* verbs, the pattern of the -*er* verbs probably has an overshadowing effect (Ellis 2006) on other verbs (except the four highly frequent verbs). Accordingly, other verb patterns only become available to attention after a longer experience with the French type frequency effect, see (Bybee 2008). Given the opaque relationship between spoken and written language, mastery of the written forms is not necessarily helpful for oral production; the L1 phonological system could lead to misspelling (Prévost 2009).

In another study, Ågren and van de Ågren and Weijer (2013) compared the production of the same phenomenon by children aged five to six and nine to ten years old with French as their only or as one of their first language(s), or as their L2. The children performed an oral and written narrative production task where the task was the same in both modes.

The results for the oral production showed that none of the children in the study had difficulty with subject–verb agreement in singular contexts. However, all the children overused singular forms in plural contexts, thus employing the pattern of the -*er* verbs on other verbs, except for the highly frequent verbs *être* 'be' and *avoir* 'have,' which were produced correctly. As in the 2017 study, the more experience the learners had with the target language, the more the plural forms were produced correctly. In other words, the L1 children were more often correct than the bilingual children, who performed better than the L2 learners. Finally, the older children in each group performed better than the younger ones (Ågren and Weijer 2013, pp. 326, 328).

The results for the written production showed a significant difference only between the L1 and the L2 children, but not between the L1 and the bilinguals, nor between the bilinguals and the L2 children. All of the children produced fewer errors for the singular than for the plural forms and also fewer errors for the verbs where there is an audible difference between 3rd person singular and plural (patterns 3 and 4 in example (6) above). In other words, the plural marker *-nt* was more often omitted for the regular -*er* verbs than for the verbs with stem alternation.

The authors argue that the differing results between oral and written production are not due to frequency patterns but are inherent to the absence/presence of phonological cues between the two forms, meaning that the verbs with an audible cue for the difference between singular and plural are produced more correctly in terms of subject–verb agreement than those with silent morphology. In other words, frequency alone is not enough to explain developmental challenges in L2 acquisition; rather, other factors, such as perceptual salience, also play a role. In terms of input, the authors conclude that "a rich and continuous exposure to spoken and written language is a prerequisite for a successful acquisition of these complex aspects of the French language" (Ågren and Weijer 2013, p. 332).

#### *4.3. The Development of Past Tense*

The presentation of the French verb morphology in Section 3 underlined the fact that the two past tense forms are homophonous for the -*er* verbs. This means that the form– function association specific to the two past tense forms is phonologically not salient for 90% of French verbs. This suggests that the learners might need more input with irregular verbs in order to notice the specific functions of the two past tense forms.

Earlier research on the L2 learning of French at different ages has shown that the development of French past tense is rather slow in the sense that there are still difficulties even at advanced levels of proficiency (Bartning and Schlyter 2004; Kihlstedt and Schlyter 2009). L2 learners of French mainly use the *passé composé* or a bare past participle and the present tense. The *imparfait* is mainly restricted to *était* 'was' and *avait* 'had,' which are the two verbs most frequently used in this tense in French (Kihlstedt and Schlyter 2009).

In their studies, Nicoladis et al. (2007) and Paradis et al. (2011) examined French regular and irregular verbs separately. The results show that both French monolingual and bilingual children have more difficulties in producing the correct form of the past participle for irregular than for regular verbs. For irregular verbs, the past participle is often replaced by the infinitive or by a form inspired by the homophonous form of the -*er* verbs. In these studies, the correct production of irregular verbs was correlated to the amount of exposure to French, with more exposure giving better results, suggesting that the frequency of forms in the input may play an important role in the acquisition of verb morphology.

A study with similar results has been conducted with L2 children (Thomas 2014a). The production of French verbs in the past tense by children who were at beginner to intermediate levels was correct in more than 90% of the cases for the regular verbs (11 verbs), a proportion that was reached for only 2 of the 10 irregular verbs studied (*partir* 'leave' and *venir* 'come'). These results suggest that input frequency plays a role in the production of the past tense. The high proportion of correct past tense marking for regular verbs by L2 children, even with verbs frequent in present tense, can be explained as an effect of type frequency. The systematic association between past tense and a form in [e] (see Table 3) in regular verbs is a pattern that L2 children seem to grasp quickly. On the other hand, correct past tense marking is more difficult with irregular verbs, since the learners are dependent on token frequency; that is, on the number of times they encounter a specific form.

The study by Nicoladis and colleagues (2007) is particularly interesting because they empirically established the frequency of English and French past tense in native

spoken and written data. They counted the number of different verbs (types) and of tokens in production data from two L1 French speaking children in the CHILDES corpus (MacWhinney 2002): Philippe and Grégoire. They randomly chose three sessions from the data and counted the number of past tense verbs used by the adults in the presence of the children (Nicoladis et al. 2007, p. 240). The results showed that regular verbs constituted the majority of verbs both in the number of different verbs and of tokens in the input to both French children. They then compared these data with data from two cartoons, and again, found that French regular verbs are "on average, very high in token frequency relative to English verbs and slightly higher in type frequency" (Nicoladis et al. 2007, p. 241). Again, French regular verbs were more frequent than irregular verbs, both in tokens and in types. This means not only that the -*er* verb pattern is dominant but that these regular verbs are among the most frequently used verbs in French.

Another interesting question is the frequency of past tense forms compared to other common forms in spoken French. Collins et al. (2009), for example, showed that the English regular past tense was quite infrequent in the input provided to the learners in the study. In a small-scale study, Thomas (2014b) examined the frequency of 15 common regular verbs and 15 common irregular verbs in a range of corpora that could be used as a proxy for L2 learner input. Except for the data from the textbook, the same corpora were used as in Thomas (2009) but with the addition of the following:

Again, the compilation included all the forms presented in Table 3 above. The results are illustrated in Table 5.

**Table 5.** Distribution of the most frequent forms in 15 regular and 15 irregular verbs in five corpora of spoken French.

The results of this analysis show that the present tense (singular and 3rd person plural) is the most frequent tense for both kinds of verbs. It also appears that the *imparfait* is very rare (5–6%) and that the past participle is less frequent (14–18%) than the infinitive (around 16–23%). This suggests that the past tense forms are less available in the input to learners than the other forms. It is also interesting to note that there are proportionally more infinitives and past participles for regular verbs than for irregular verbs. However, given the homophony between the two forms for the -*er* verbs, the relationship between form and function is not made salient with these verbs. In summary, the input to the learner, as measured here, is probably insufficient for the learners to notice the differences between the homophonous forms for the regular -*er* verbs. The combination of the variation of different forms for irregular verbs, making each specific form infrequent, and of the dominance of the present tense for these verbs probably contributes to the slow development of L2 French verb morphology.

#### **5. Conclusions**

The aim of this article was to present the French verb morphological system in terms of frequency, salience, and form–function association and to show its implications for L2 input processing. This article also presented a review of studies that examined the relationship between input characteristics and the L2 development of verb morphology. The studies presented suggest an influence of input on L2 production and confirm that one of the difficulties inherent in learning French can be related to the very high type frequency of the regular -*er* verbs. Moreover, unlike other languages, such as English, the -*er* verbs are also frequent in tokens. Thus, the different forms of irregular verbs (other than the four most frequent verbs) are scarce in the learners' input. Additionally, it seems that irregular verbs are mainly used in the present tense, which adds to the low level of salience of the two past tense forms in the input. To a learner, oral French input suggests two frequent forms: a singular present tense form on the one hand, and a multifunctional form ending in [e] on the other hand. One avenue of research worth pursuing would be to study the effect of an input enriched with "common" irregular verbs in order to see whether such input could facilitate the learning of French verb morphology.

This article focused on input characteristics as studied in corpora and on the influence of input on the acquisition of L2 French. However, there are many different ways of investigating the influence of input, as well as other factors that play a role in L2 language acquisition. For example, the study of Ågren et al. (2014) showed that there is a combined effect of age of onset, the input situation of the learners in terms of active access to the target language, and the linguistic characteristics of the morphosyntactic phenomena under investigation. Additionally, as underlined by Howard (2011), input is not a monolithic entity but consists of several layers. Important factors include the role of implicit and explicit approaches to L2 teaching and the context of learning, such as traditional classroom teaching, immersive approaches, or "in the wild" (see Cadierno and Eskildsen 2015).

Recently, the issue of input in French L2 has grown in importance in the field of French language teaching. The role of corpora of authentic language as input to L2 learners is a current and dynamic trend of research. According to Boulton (2017), early results show a positive effect of this kind of input on the development of (academic) written language as well as on a better comprehension of the target language (for example, on the use of frequent discourse markers). However, we know very little about the effect of corpora on the development of oral production in the long run. Finally, input quality has mainly been conceptualized/operationalized as the quality of the environment, as in the work of Paradis and colleagues, but there are very few attempts at discussing the quality of input material, for example in obligatory school settings (see, e.g., Kasprowicz and Marsden 2018; Sakata 2019).

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Acknowledgments:** Many thanks to the reviewers for their very useful comments on an earlier version of this article and to Anna Auger for proofreading and improving the quality of the text.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**

## *Article* **How the CEFR Is Impacting French-as-a-Second-Language in Ontario, Canada: Teachers' Self-Reported Instructional Practices and Students' Proficiency Exam Results**

**Katherine Rehner 1,\* , Anne Popovich 2 and Ivan Lasan 2**

**Abstract:** This exploratory article describes (1) the self-reported instructional practices of a group of 103 Kindergarten to Grade 12 French-as-a-second-language (FSL) teachers from school boards across Ontario, Canada before and after intensive and extensive professional learning about the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) and (2) the areas of strength and opportunities for improvement in the FSL proficiency of 434 Grade 12 students from school boards across Ontario in their final year of study, as measured through their outcomes on the Diplôme d'études en langue française (the FSL proficiency exam aligned with the CEFR). In looking across the findings from these early-CEFR-adopter teachers and these highly-motivated students at the end of their FSL studies, the article offers a window onto how the CEFR is impacting the local landscape of FSL education in the province.

**Keywords:** instructional practices; proficiency outcomes; French as a second language; CEFR; DELF; action-oriented instruction; task-based language teaching

#### **1. Introduction**

Over the past four decades, French-as-a-second-language (FSL) education in Ontario, Canada has undergone significant changes, with the grammar-based general program descriptions of the 1980s (Ontario Ministry of Education 1980) being replaced by ever-moreelaborate grade- and program-specific curriculum documents. By the late 1990s/early 2000s, requirements for assessment of student achievement had moved from the evaluation of discrete skills to performance-based achievement (Ontario Ministry of Education 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001). For example, the Grade 11 and 12 document (for students aged 16–18 years) for Core French courses (the most-common mode of FSL program delivery in Ontario in which students learn French as a subject) aimed "to provide students with fundamental communication skills in French and an understanding of the nature of the language and its culture" (Ontario Ministry of Education 2000, p. 2). The purpose of the program at that time was to develop oral communication, reading, and writing skills "using a thematic approach" which would provide a variety of contexts for language learning (Ontario Ministry of Education 2000, p. 4). While the guidelines stressed the consistent use of French in the classroom both by students and the teacher, the focus of the learning was also tied to the mastery of a "range of specific language structures" and vocabulary determined by the themes. In the Core French curriculum document for Grades 9 and 10 (for students aged 14–16 years), constant review and re-use of these structures and vocabulary were seen as "essential and natural in language study" and aimed to provide students with the base from which they could build their language capacity "so that they can apply their knowledge of French in situations that are meaningful to them" (Ontario

**Citation:** Rehner, Katherine, Anne Popovich, and Ivan Lasan. 2021. How the CEFR Is Impacting French-asa-Second-Language in Ontario, Canada: Teachers' Self-Reported Instructional Practices and Students' Proficiency Exam Results. *Languages* 6: 15. https://doi.org/10.3390/ languages6010015

Received: 26 October 2020 Accepted: 16 January 2021 Published: 21 January 2021

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Ministry of Education 1999, p. 4). Expectations of the Core French program under these guidelines also included the reading of French literature and an integrated study of the culture of French-language regions. The documents stressed the link between language and culture and therefore insisted that cultural studies "be integrated into daily instruction rather than presented in an isolated fashion or on an occasional basis" (Ontario Ministry of Education 2000, p. 4). The Core French documents proposed as its outcomes a level of French that allowed students to exchange information in verbal communication and to demonstrate global understanding of written and audio materials (Ontario Ministry of Education 2000). These guidelines also foregrounded the interconnectivity of the language skills, in that through their oral and reading experiences students would "acquire the skills they need to become good writers who are able to communicate ideas and opinions with ease and clarity" (Ontario Ministry of Education 2000, p. 7). Under these guidelines, learning expectations were enlarged and required students to apply a combination of skills to complete learning activities. This kind of outcomes- or competence-based student learning required teachers to begin to employ a "backward design" (Richards 2013) approach to teaching, which starts with the learning outcome, from which lessons and activities are then constructed to guide students to successful attainment of the expectations (Richards and Rodgers 2014). Successful completion of an FSL course under these guidelines was achieved through the students' demonstrated oral and written literacy in French with a strong emphasis on grammatical accuracy.

In contrast, the expectations of the most-recent Ontario Ministry of Education FSL curriculum guidelines introduced in 2013–2014 (Ontario Ministry of Education 2013, 2014) are informed by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) (Council of Europe 2001). The CEFR provides "a common basis for the elaboration of language syllabuses, curriculum guidelines, examinations, textbooks, etc." (Council of Europe, p. 1). The CEFR provides a series of standardized descriptors which are used to evaluate competences in foreign languages across five activities (reading, writing, listening, spoken interaction, and spoken production) at six achievement levels. The descriptors for each activity are written as "Can do" statements and include a description of what L2 learners "can do" in the target language at the various levels of proficiency. The CEFR is descriptive as opposed to prescriptive and therefore "the framework is designed to be flexible and practitioners are encouraged to adapt it across various L2 educational contexts" (Faez et al. 2011b, p. 5). Although extensively used in Europe for over two decades, the adaptation of the CEFR to educational contexts in Canada is more recent, with widespread interest only in the last ten years or so (Arnott et al. 2017). CEFR-informed teaching and learning emphasizes language production through interaction (Piccardo 2013). Ontario's current FSL curriculum documents, informed by the CEFR, promote the creation of an action-oriented learning environment in the classroom in which students learn through meaningful interactive tasks based in real-world, everyday contexts. The current documents start from the perspective that "communicative and action-oriented approaches to teaching French put meaningful and authentic communication at the centre of all learning activities" (Ontario Ministry of Education 2014, p. 9). This emphasis on authentic and meaningful interaction shifts the teaching of FSL away from presenting language "as a system of disconnected and isolated components" (Ontario Ministry of Education 2014, p. 9) and aims to focus FSL learners "on what it is they are trying to communicate; what they need others to understand, and why" (Ontario Ministry of Education 2014, p. 7). Under these guidelines, "language instruction must provide significant levels of meaningful communication and interactive feedback in the target language so that students can develop both language proficiency and cultural understanding" (Ontario Ministry of Education 2014, p. 9). The expectations of the current documents stress oral communication (listening and speaking), which is viewed as essential to second language (L2) acquisition. While both the previous and current documents encourage a balance of interconnected skills development (listening, speaking, reading, and writing), the current curriculum focuses classroom practice on the introduction of language that is relevant to

students' communication needs and the practice of language skills through interaction that is meaningful to students. The expectations of the current FSL curriculum signal a shift away from a cognitive-based approach to L2 teaching and learning with a heavy emphasis on the mastery of grade-specific grammatical structures. The goals of the new curriculum reach beyond this cognitive model: while "students need to acquire a strong foundation in the French language" they must "focus on communicating in French" (Ontario Ministry of Education 2014, p. 6). Therefore, FSL teachers find themselves in a position of needing to adopt a socio-culturally-informed approach to teaching in which language is presented in context and through tasks that are interactive and useful to language learners in their everyday lives.

In recent years, the Diplôme d'études en langue française: for beginners and intermediatelevel learner*s* (DELF), the FSL proficiency exam aligned with the CEFR, has been administered in many Ontario schools, in partnership with local educational authorities, to Grade 12 students in their final year of schooling as a means to capture their proficiency at the end of their FSL studies. The DELF exam, developed in France by the Centre International d'Études Pédagogiques, tests and certifies the French language skills of non-native speakers through examinations that "have been designed to reflect the principle of action used by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, which defines users of a language as social actors who have tasks to perform (that are not only linguistic) in given circumstances, in a given environment and within a specific area of action, which may be personal, public, academic or professional" (Centre International d'Etudes Pédagogiques CIEP 2021). Since 2005, the expectations of the DELF have been consistent with those of the CEFR, and different versions of the exam have been made available around the world in order to meet the needs of a wide range of French-language learners, both school-age and adult (Vandergrift 2012). There are six independent DELF diplomas and each diploma corresponds to one of the six levels of the *CEFR*: A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, and C2. Recognized in 175 countries, the DELF is the official French-language diploma awarded by France's Ministry of National Education to recognize success at the A and B levels. Level A recognizes basic user proficiency, while Level B recognizes independent user ability. At each level, a series of examinations evaluates all four language skills. Each skill is weighted equally for a total of 100 points for each exam. In order to obtain the diploma, a student must obtain at least 50 points, with a minimum of 5 out of 25 for each skill (Vandergrift 2012). As described on DestinatiONtario DestinatiONtario DELF (2021), an information site for Ontario FSL students and their parents that is funded by the Ontario Ministry of Education and the Government of Canada through the Department of Canadian Heritage, when administered in Ontario's school boards, DELF testing procedures are strictly observed to ensure test security and diploma credibility. The teachers from these boards who act as examiners and markers must complete training conducted by authorized instructors and must recertify every five years. The monitoring of exam materials is maintained to ensure that the DELF continues to be recognized by the Association of Language Testers in Europe. Ontario students taking the exam do so above and beyond the requirements of their FSL programs and may choose to attempt any level of the exam they feel is appropriate to their abilities; however, they must decide well beforehand the level of the DELF they wish to challenge.

Set within this context of changing FSL orientations, the present exploratory article describes the self-reported instructional practices of a group of early-CEFR-adopter FSL teachers in Ontario as they think retrospectively about their practices before having engaged in intensive and extensive CEFR-related professional learning experiences versus their reports of their current practices after their professional learning. It also describes the areas of strength and opportunities for proficiency improvement, measured through the CEFR-aligned DELF exam, of a group of highly-motivated Grade 12 Ontario learners who have continued with their learning of French beyond the mandatory years and who are now preparing to graduate from their FSL studies, which were undertaken under the former curriculum guidelines (i.e., before the introduction of the CEFR-informed, task-based documents). In looking across the findings for these two groups, the article concludes by considering how the CEFR is impacting the local landscape of FSL education in Ontario.

#### **2. Literature Review**

The CEFR's action-oriented approach, which emphasizes language production through interaction (Piccardo 2013), lends itself nicely to a task-based approach to language teaching (Little 2006). As Piccardo (2014, p. 28) explains, "the action-oriented task seeks to break down the walls of the classroom and connect it with the outside world." The DELF exam structure also draws heavily on the use of interactive tasks based in real-world, everyday contexts, as do Ontario's current CEFR-informed FSL guidelines, which rely on such meaningful tasks in order to put authentic communication at the center of all classroom teaching and learning. Thus, in looking to understand how the CEFR is impacting Ontario FSL education, it is first important to clarify what is meant by a task-based approach to language teaching, particularly as viewed in an action-oriented approach.

#### *2.1. Task-Based Language Teaching from an Action-Oriented Approach*

Task-based language teaching differs from traditional language teaching approaches in that it emphasizes the need to engage learners through tasks where the primary focus is on real-world communication, while still drawing learners' attention to the forms needed to successfully carry out the task (Long 2014). Tasks that use language beyond the confines of the classroom are what Long (1985, p. 89), in his seminal work, referred to as targeted tasks, that is "a piece of work undertaken for oneself or for others [ . . . ] the hundred and one things people do in everyday life, at work, at play and in between." The goal of such tasks is not linguistic but rather functional and communicative. When such tasks are brought into the classroom, they become pedagogical tasks. As Nunan (2004, p. 4) explains, a pedagogical task is "a piece of classroom work that involves learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing or interacting in the target language while their attention is focused on mobilizing their grammatical knowledge in order to express meaning, and in which the intention is to convey meaning rather than to manipulate form." What is important here is that such tasks require the learner to put into action their grammatical knowledge to accomplish a goal linked to real-world communication. Realworld communication, as explained in Halliday's (1985) influential early work, can serve a number of intertwined purposes, including a transactional or service macrofunction (e.g., exchanging goods and services), an interpersonal or social macrofunction (e.g., socializing with others), and an aesthetic macrofunction (e.g., enjoyment). Indeed, different kinds of tasks create opportunities for different kinds of real-world interactions that foster the processes involved in second language acquisition (Ellis et al. 2019). The kind of real-world communication that tasks envision necessitates the negotiation of meaning and form as interlocutors work to understand each other, express themselves, and accomplish the task at hand. In the classroom, this type of negotiation is achieved through task-based interaction, particularly when accompanied by corrective feedback that draws learners' attention to form as it is used in the service of conveying meaning.

In implementing task-based language teaching, teachers must think carefully about the three task stages outlined by Ellis (2003), namely the pre-task, the main task, and the post-task. The goals of the pre-task, according to Ellis et al. (2019), are to provide learning opportunities that motivate learners by helping them to see the relevance of the task for their own life in the real world and that prepare them for the task by clarifying the procedures and outcomes and by ensuring that they have the schematic and linguistic knowledge necessary to carry out the task. The main task focuses on the successful completion of the task at hand through interaction requiring real-world communication. During the task, teachers encourage learners to focus on form either through pre-emptive interventions (i.e., in anticipation of an error or in response to a form-related request by the learner) or reactively through corrective feedback (i.e., after an error is made). Corrective feedback can be offered by explicit or implicit means and can take the form of recasts, repetition, elicitation, clarification requests, metalinguistic clues, and explicit correction (Lyster and Ranta 1997). The post-task provides follow-up learning opportunities by having learners repeat the task (exactly, procedurally, or in terms of its content), by addressing linguistic forms that were problematic for learners during the main task, and by having learners reflect on the task and/or their or others' performance (Ellis et al. 2019).

Task-based language teaching is, thus, clearly different from traditional approaches, like those informing Ontario's previous FSL guidelines, that presented language "as a system of disconnected and isolated components" (Ontario Ministry of Education 2014, p. 9). Instead, a task-based approach, as reflected in Ontario's current CEFR-inspired documents, focuses learners "on what it is they are trying to communicate; what they need others to understand, and why" (Ontario Ministry of Education 2014, p. 7). This is all the more so the case when task-based language teaching is set within an action-oriented approach. As Bourguignon (2010, p. 19—translated from French) explains, in an actionoriented approach, the task "puts the learner into action; it places the learner in the action. The task must make the learner more autonomous as a user of the language. The task must enable the learner to line up needs and a goal to be achieved, by selecting relevant knowledge and useful skills." In this way, as Piccardo (2014) explains, the communicative activities required by tasks are not the goal as such, but rather a means to stimulate genuine interaction among students as they act effectively and autonomously to collaboratively map out a way to accomplish the task, all the while making judgements about what the situation requires and what linguistic and non-linguistic tools they possess to do this. The role of the teacher in this process (Piccardo 2014, p. 31) is to help students "with their strategic approach, notably during the stages that involve planning the task, making decisions, realizing which competences to activate, understanding their strengths and weaknesses, conducting searches, and reflecting on what they have learned, what they are able to do, and how they do it." This understanding of task-based language teaching within an actionoriented approach reveals an "open, dynamic, and evolving vision" (Piccardo 2014, p. 31) of the learner as an active social agent.

#### *2.2. The CEFR in Canadian FSL Education*