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This comprehensive case study of a systematic shift in object expression provides insight into the construal of a class of two-place activity verbs in the history of French and proposes that a change in the prepositional system underlies the shift. The book focuses on nineteen verbs of helping and hindering whose single internal object shifts from indirect to direct object during the 15th and 16th century. It describes how these verbs are distinguished from all other verbs that take indirect.

In this study, we tested the predictions of 2 opposing perspectives on the nature of the deficit in specific language impairment (SLI): the domain-general, cognitive/perceptual processing view and the domain-specific, linguistic representational view. Data consisted of spontaneous speech samples from French-English bilingual children with SLI; younger, typically developing, bilingual language peers, and monolingual French comparison groups. We analyzed the children's use of direct object clitics/pronouns and definite articles in French and English. The bilingual children had more difficulty with clitics in French than articles in French and pronouns in English; and bilingual children with SLI performed like their younger, unaffected bilingual peers and like monolinguals with SLI. We argue that these findings present challenges to the domain-general perspective and support the claim that domain-specific limitations in linguistic representation are a component of SLI.

The article presents results from a recent study that isolated grammar instruction that is deductive (i.e., involving rule presentation and metalinguistic information) as a variable and contrasted it with an instructional treatment that is inductive (i.e., focusing on form with no explicit grammar instruction). The effectiveness of these two types of instruction was compared on measures of both comprehension and production. The study also investigated the interaction between type of instruction and the morphological and syntactical features involved in the acquisition of direct object pronouns in French as a second language. The results revealed a significant advantage for the deductive instruction group. The study highlighted the difficulty of designing language measures that access implicit language knowledge. It also underlined the strong relationship that exists between the observed effectiveness of a particular type of instruction and tests/measures used. (Verlag, adapt.).

El objetivo de este estudio consiste en el análisis de la complementación verbal en diez manuales de gramática del francés publicados en España en los últimos 30 años con el fin de observar su grado de contextualización. Se trata de un tema especialmente controvertido y con cierta dificultad para los estudiantes españoles de francés lengua extranjera debido a las constantes vacilaciones terminológicas, además de las definiciones a veces contradictorias o no coincidentes en ambas lenguas. Insistimos especialmente en algunos procedimientos de contextualización identificados en los diferentes textos: uso de la L1, actividades de sensibilización interlingüística, discurso contrastivo y adaptaciones del discurso gramatical.

This paper reviews studies that have contrasted the effectiveness of structured-input instruction with output-based instruction. It then presents results from a study comparing the relative effects of structured-input and output-based instruction on students' ability to comprehend and produce direct object pronouns in second language French. Three classes of students (N = 70) were assigned to three groups: structured-input instruction, output-based instruction, and control. Students were assessed on listening comprehension, reading comprehension, written production, and oral production tasks. All but one of these language measures required a pressured response. Overall, the results showed greater gains for the outputbased instruction group.

Beginning language textbooks typically display an essentially structure-based approach, with linguistic patterns explained overtly through analytical presentations. Textbook authors frequently lace these presentations with grammatical terms such as \"conjugated verb\" or \"indirect object.\" Many instructors believe, however, that their students are unfamiliar with this metalinguistic vocabulary; anecdotal evidence suggests that language learners may not comprehend even such fundamental structural concepts as \"subject\" or \"verb.\" This article discusses the results of a study in which beginning French students were tested on their familiarity with ten common grammatical terms and concludes with some brief remarks on the pedagogical implications of the data.

Much of the work on the second language acquisition of restrictive relative clauses has made reference to the similarities between learners' order of difficulty and Keenan and Comrie's (1977) typologically determined noun phrase accessibility hierarchy for relativisation (AH). There has been little consideration, however, of whether this 'theory of markedness' (for that is the implication of citing the AH in the context of second language learning) actually determines the way that second language learners develop rules for restrictive relative clauses. The present study examines the way that learners of L2 French construct rules for French relativiser morphology from this perspective. It is found that there is no evidence to support the view that learners make use of a theory of markedness like the AH in constructing such rules. Rather, learners appear to construct rules on the basis of the linear ordering of the constituents of restrictive relative clauses in surface configurations. From the evidence it is suggested that 'markedness' in the development of L2 restrictive relative clauses is not a feature of the grammatical component of learners' linguistic knowledge, but is a feature of their L2 processing capacity.

A comparison of two methods for teaching grammatical structures in a foreign lang. Students from two introductory Coll French classes (N = 32) were individually instructed in two grammatical structures: one that was completely new to them & one that had previously been covered in class. Students were randomly assigned to one of two learning conditions for the new structure & participated in the other condition for the review structure. In the feedback condition, students answered questions requiring use of the structure after only a brief introduction to it (no introduction for the review structure). Their inevitable mistakes were then systematically corrected by the teacher using an ordered series of prompts; never did she produce the correct sentence for them. In the modeling conditions, students heard correct sentence models that were actually the answers to the questions that Ss in the feedback condition responded to. Ss were given oral tests immediately following exposure to each structure, & took a written exam, covering both structures, after the entire session. Results showed that learning was better in the feedback condition, both orally & in writing, especially for the new structure. The results were interpreted as support for the cognitivist position that oral practice & error correction play important roles in foreign-lang learning. 2 Tables, 20 References. AA

We describe a system under development, whose goal is to provide a \"natural\" environment for students learning to produce sentences in French. The learning objective is personal pronouns, the method is inductive (learning through exploration). Input of the learning component are conceptual structures (meanings) and the corresponding linguistic forms (sentences), its outputs are rules characterizing these data. The learning is dialogue based, that is to say, the student may ask certain kinds of questions such as: How does one say ?, Can one say ?, Why does one say ?, and the system answers them. By integrating the student into the process, that is, by encouraging him to build and explore a search space we hope to enhance not only his learning efficiency (what and how to learn), but also our understanding of the underlying processes. By analyzing the trace of the dialogue (what questions have been asked at what moment), we may infer the strategies a student put to use. Although the system covers far more than what is discussed here, we will restrict our discussion to a small subset of grammar, personal pronouns, which are known to be a notorious problem both in first and second language learning.

Analyzed are postnominal positions filled by adjs & prepositional phrases in French. The discussion is presented in order of increasing complexity of the structures. It is argued that any effective analysis of these structures must take into account all of the relevant factors; eg, rhythm, meaning, transformations, & style. B. Annesser