Literacy in a Foreign Language: The Learning of French Pronouns by ESL Learners

Abstract

This study investigates the French pronoun paradigm in the non-native grammarsof adult university L1 (first language) Chinese speakers who have learnt Englishas a dominant L2 (second language) and French as a foreign language. Specificallythe study seeks.to identify the types of Interlanguage structures produced by LIChinese speakers in their learning of French pronouns.A questionnaire was administered to obtain information about the learners'background and to select the sample for the study. The respondents selected forthis study were twenty-three adult L1 Chinese speakers who were Bachelor ofArts (French) students at the Faculty of Modem Languages and Communicationat Universiti Putra Malaysia. Three tasks were designed to collect the requiteddata. The first was a Grammaticality Judgement Task where respondents judgedand selected the correct pronouns in 75 French sentences. The second task whichcomprised 50 items required the respondents to replace noun phrases with thecorrect pronouns in French. This was a transformation task. The third task whichcomprised 50 items was a blank-filling task where respondents had to fill in eachblank with the correct form of the pronoun in French. These tasks wereadministered over three sessions of about one hour each.The data indicate that some French pronouns were more problematic than othersfor the learners. An explanation is provided as to why this might be the case andwhat the findings mean in terms of literacy in a foreign language.