Individual variations in learners’ ability to use connectives in a foreign language

Wetzel, Mathis; Zufferey, Sandrine; Gygax, Pascal (2 July 2021). Individual variations in learners’ ability to use connectives in a foreign language (Unpublished). In: 17th International Pragmatics Conference. Winterthur, Switzerland. 27 June to 2 July 2021.

Connectives are linguistic items that indicate discourse relations like cause and condition between discourse segments and thus represent crucial elements for coherence (Halliday and Hasan, 1976; Sanders, Spooren, & Noordman, 1992). Despite their high frequency in most discourse genres, the ability to handle connectives typical of the written mode has been found to be quite variable even among adult native speakers (Zufferey & Gygax, 2020), and this variability has been linked to the degree of exposure to print that people have.
In this presentation, we investigate the ability of German-speaking learners of French to use 12 French connectives typical of the written mode. We also investigate the role of three variables that could account for the variability between learners: language proficiency; exposure to print in the second language (French) and exposure to print in the first language (German). In a sentence completion task performed online, we tested 151 German-speaking learners of French as well as a control group of 63 French native speakers. In order to assess learners’ proficiency level in written French, we gave them a written language competence task (Zufferey and Gygax, 2020) and a vocabulary knowledge-test (Lextale, Brysbaert, 2013). In addition, we tested the exposition to print in both their L1 (Art-Ger, Grolig, Tiffin-Richards & Schroeder, 2020) and L2 (Art-F, Zufferey and Gygax, 2020). Finally, in a self-assessment task, we measured learners’ perceived importance of 10 given factors (e.g. school, friends, reading, Internet) for their acquisition of French.
Results indicate that for the non-native speakers, a higher vocabulary knowledge and a better grammar mastery predicted a better score in the main task. More intriguingly, a higher exposition to print in L1, but not in L2, also predicted a better mastery of connectives in L2. These results thus tend to indicate that L2 acquisition research should focus more on the first language competence of the participants as predictors of their ability to use connectives, as results show that there are several factors that facilitate or hinder learners’ mastery that are linked to their native language. These factors raise important questions about a possible interaction between the native and foreign languages (see also Sparks, Patton, Ganschow, Humbach, & Javorsky, 2006; Sparks, Patton, Ganschow, & Humbach, 2012). Finally, participants that assigned a higher importance to the factor reading for their acquisition of French were more likely to score higher at the main task. Beside supporting our finding of the link between connective mastery and the exposition to print, this finding shows that subjective impressions of participants are reliable predictors of their level of competence.

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