Higher sem. in Bilingualism. Anita Thomas: Longitudinal development of interaction competence in migrants with French as a second
language

During this seminar, I will present some results from a research project which aimed to support the development of interactional competences in migrants with French L2 using spoken French corpora. The project had a strong applied component with the development of teaching material focusing on different interactional phenomena, mainly discourse markers. The migrants were training for manual trades and spent one day a week at school. Our interventions took place during culture and communication classes eight times over two years in ten different classes. At the very beginning of each intervention, we audio-recorded the participants during free peer interaction (10 minutes).

will first present results for the discourse markers. Their appropriate use is a central aspect in the development of L2 oral interaction competence (Reaves, 2023; Youn, 2023). However, they are rarely addressed in French L2 textbooks. Our teaching material introduced a.o. “d’accord” ‘ok’, “du coup” ‘so’, “donc” ‘so, “genre” ‘like’, “trop” ‘too much’ and “juste” ‘just’ with different excerpts from French spoken corpora. The analysis of learner production is based on the data from 21 speakers of L2 French having a non-European first language (20-30 years old, in the country since 2 to 7 years) and a low level of education (Young-Scholten, 2013). For some discourse markers, there was an increase in their use after they had been taught. Some learners really appreciated our inputs and although they did not use the discourse markers in their own production, they mentioned them in comments or in jokes.

In the second part of my presentation, I will present some work in progress which focuses on the development of comprehension in interaction. This is an aspect of French that the migrants seem to have developed most. The analysis will mainly be based on the work of Sert (2019) who distinguishes between claiming (with e.g. hm, ok) and demonstrating active listenership, and the work of Kunitz & Yeh (2019) on topic management. The analysis will focus on collaborative completions in interaction – which are expected to increase over time – and the number of abrupt topic shifts – which are expected to decrease over time. Preliminary results show a development for most of the participants but also strategies to avoid comprehension issues.

Anita Thomas