Jonas Granfeldt

The acquisition of the determiner phrase in bilingual and second language French

This study deals with the acquisition of Functional Categories in the French Determiner Phrase. The development of determiners and prenominal adjectives in three bilingual Swedish–French children is compared with that of four Swedish second language learners of French. It is argued that acquisition is crucially different in these two cases. The bilingual children initially have restrictions on phrase structure, resulting at one stage in a complementary distribution of determiners and adjectives. These results support a structure building view of L1 acquisition. For L2 acquisition of the same structure, there is no evidence for an initially reduced phrase structure. This finding is explained in terms of a transfer effect. A preliminary comparison with the acquisition of finiteness suggests that, whereas there is some correlation over time in the L1B subjects, no such correlation is found in the L2 learners.

Direkt Profil: A System for Evaluating Texts of Second Language Learners of French Based on Developmental Sequences

Direkt Profil is an automatic analyzer of texts written in French as a second language. Its objective is to produce an evaluation of the developmental stage of students under the form of a grammatical learner profile. Direkt Profil carries out a sentence analysis based on developmental sequences, i.e. local morphosyntactic phenomena linked to a development in the acquisition of French. The paper presents the corpus that we use to develop the system and briefly, the developmental sequences. Then, it describes the annotation that we have defined, the parser, and the user interface. We conclude by the results obtained so far: on the test corpus the systems obtains a recall of 83% and a precision of 83%.

The development of gender in simultaneous and successive bilingual acquisition of French : Evidence for AOA and input effects

This study investigates the effects of Age of Onset of Acquisition (AOA) and the quality and quantity of input on the longitudinal development of gender in the acquisition of French by simultaneous (2L1) and successive bilinguals (cL2). Three aspects of French gender are studied: the abstract GENDER feature, gender assignment and gender concord. The findings show that amount and quality of input correlate significantly with the rate of development of gender assignment. Group-level analyses on gender concord show that there is no significant difference between the L1 and the 2L1 groups and that error patterns are different in the 2L1 and cL2 groups. We conclude that while it is clear from the data that the development of gender assignment is primarily dependent on input conditions the question is more open with respect to gender concord. For concord a combination of AOA, the L1 acquisitional timetable, and input are important factors.

SLA developmental stages and teachers’ assessment of written French: Exploring Direkt Profil as a diagnostic assessment tool

One core area of research in Second Language Acquisition is the identification and definition of developmental stages in different L2s. For L2 French, Bartning and Schlyter (2004) presented a model of six morphosyntactic stages of development in the shape of grammatical profiles. The model formed the basis for the computer program Direkt Profil (Granfeldt et al., 2006), which carries out an automated analysis of the developmental stage of a learner text. The aim of the present study was to explore the relevance of Direkt Profil as a diagnostic assessment tool by comparing Direkt Profil’s automated profile analysis with assessment by trained language teachers. Data for the present study come from the CEFLE corpus of written L2 French (Ågren, 2008). The learner texts were first analysed for developmental stage by the computer program Direkt Profil. In a second step, seven experienced language teachers of French assessed the same texts. The results indicated relatively high degrees of correlation and showed that the analysis of developmental stage by Direkt Profil could explain 73% of the variance in the teachers’ mean assessments (r2 = 0.735). In addition, we concluded that the teachers were in agreement with each other and with the computer program when assessing texts at low and high proficiency levels respectively. The most important variation in the teachers’ assessments was found in texts at intermediate levels, due to an inconsistent use of grammar and vocabulary. One of the advantages of using Direkt Profil as a diagnostic assessment tool is that it provides immediate and detailed feedback indicating how certain types of linguistic structures, correct or incorrect, are related to different stages of development.

Offering research education for in-service language teachers

Since 2008, the Swedish government has launched occasional offers of funding for graduate schools aimed at practising teachers. The fundamental purpose of this initiative is to enhance quality in t ...