François Pichette

Impact of Maintaining L1 Reading Skills on L2 Reading Skill Development in Adults: Evidence from Speakers of Serbo-Croatian Learning French

Clarke (1980) hypothesized that effective interlingual transfer of reading skills requires the attainment of some particular threshold of second language (L2) knowledge. Results from a study by Hacquebord (1989) suggested that the interlingual transfer of reading skills also requires active reading of the first language (L1). Results from a longitudinal study carried out over a 1-year period with 52 Bosnians learning French as a L2 supported Clarke’s hypothesis but were only partially in accord with Hacquebord’s. Significant correlations between L1 and L2 reading performance for the subgroup of nonactive L1 readers suggested that failure to maintain L1 reading did not prevent the transfer of reading skills. However, the greater improvement in L2 reading ability by the active L1 readers than by the nonactive L1 readers suggested that maintaining L1 reading enhances the transfer of reading skills.

Songs vs. stories: impact of input sources on ESL vocabulary acquisition by preliterate children

Research in second language acquisition has paid little attention to preliterate children learning a language which is absent from their environment outside the language class. This study examines the acquisition of English words by 24 French-speaking children aged 35–59 months, who were introduced to 57 words, embedded in stories and songs. Four stories and four songs were randomly spread across four consecutive weekly workshops consisting of play-based pedagogical activities. The impact of the input source, number of encounters with each lexical item, animacy as a feature of the lexical items, and first language (L1) lexicon size was examined. Recall of target words was assessed through the selection between four images after hearing the word, and L1 lexicon was assessed through the Peabody test. Results show significantly higher recall for animate concepts, while no difference in recall was found in relation to input source (words in songs vs. stories) or L1 lexicon size. Results also stress the need for a possibly higher number of encounters than that normally found for adults in order to achieve significant recall.

Crosslinguistic influence in English as the weaker language of French-English and Polish-English bilingual children

This study aims to assess the extent of crosslinguistic influence in English as the weaker language of unbalanced bilingual children, and to compare the extent of such influence to that reported in the second language acquisition (SLA) literature. Additionally, by comparing children from different L1 backgrounds, we aim to see if typological distance impacts crosslinguistic influence. We collected elicited speech samples from 16 Polish-English and 44 French-English children who have had dual language input from birth, but whose English is weaker mostly because it is absent outside the home environment. The crosslinguistic error rates (an average of 6%) are lower for our participants than averages found in SLA literature, but still considerably high. Although French- and Polish-dominant children present comparable error profiles, the extent of crosslinguistic influence tends to be greater in the case of French-English bilinguals than for Polish-English bilinguals, which may reflect the perceived distance between the languages.

Extensive Reading Activities for Teaching Language (review)

© 2006 The Canadian Modern Language Review/La Revue canadienne des langues vivantes, 62, 3 (March/mars) The emphasis on action research projects, teacher collaboration, and critical reflection is one of the main assets of this volume, although it is unfortunate that this is not reflected in the title. In essence, although some weaknesses have been pointed out above, it must be concluded that the variety of topics and perspectives will surely be useful to anybody with an interest in language teacher education.