Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2024

Error analysis of vocabulary misuse in the interlanguage of French L2 learners of Chinese

Résumé

In the research field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), the L2 lexicon, often overlooked until the 1980s in comparison to grammar studies (Meara 1980), has regained increased attention. Lexical errors, as documented by Meara (1984), Gass & Selinker (2000), among others, are identified as the most prevalent among second language learners. Gass (1988) notes that while grammar errors generally result in comprehensible structures, lexical errors may significantly interfere with communication. Therefore, special attention to vocabulary acquisition is essential in both SLA research and the teaching of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL). In recent decades, the misuse of vocabulary by CFL learners has become a focal point for researchers and language teachers. Numerous studies have investigated error analysis to examine the systematicity in the interlanguage of CFL learners from various L1 backgrounds. Despite the attention given to English-speaking and Asian CFL learners, limited research exists on lexicon acquisition in the European non-English-speaking sphere (see Zhang 2011 and Xie 2013 for the review), except for Xie’s (2013) study based on questionnaires with Italian learners and Poizat’s (2018) work carried out with a corpus collected from French-speaking learners. However, it is important to note that Poizat’s (2018) study, while presenting a rich repertory of vocabulary errors of French-speaking leaners, has certain limitations, including the absence of clear information about the properties of the leaner corpus. This includes details such as the CFL level, the genre of written texts constituting the corpus (descriptive, argumentative, etc.), and information on the input received by the learners. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the written productions of intermediate-level CFL leaners at a French university. The cross-sectional corpus constructed from a school year’s homework and exams allows for longitudinal and pseudo-longitudinal studies (Gilquin 2015). In the previous studies, most lexical errors are found to be related to ‘confusable’ words, which may be formally similar (‘synphones’ and ‘syngraphs’, adopting Laufer’s (1988, 1991) terms on ‘synforms’) or semantically similar (often referred to as ‘synonyms’). However, focusing on semantic factors, Zhang (2007) convincingly argues that vocabulary misuse in L2 is not restricted to synonyms, and ‘confusable words’ do not entirely overlap with them. Vocabulary misuse and ‘confusable words’ must be studied from the perspective of the learner’s interlanguage. Hence, in the present study, strict criteria are adopted to define different types of vocabulary misusage. Preliminary results of the error analysis for intermediate-level CFL learners indicate that vocabulary misuses are primarily due to three factors, sometimes interacting: 1) The misused word and the intended word sharing a morpheme 2) The misused word and the intended word semantically similar in Chinese (synonyms) 3) The misused word and the intended word translated as the same word in L1 French The findings shed light on the lexicon acquisition properties of intermediate-level L1 French learner of L2 Chinese. Future studies can compare these results with error analysis of learner corpora at other levels (beginning and advanced) to trace the acquisition processes of French CFL learners.

Domaines

Fichier non déposé

Dates et versions

hal-04708790 , version 1 (25-09-2024)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-04708790 , version 1

Citer

Xinyue Yu. Error analysis of vocabulary misuse in the interlanguage of French L2 learners of Chinese. The 12th International Conference of the European Association of Chinese Linguistics – EACL-12, Roma Tre University, Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Sep 2024, Rome, Italy. ⟨hal-04708790⟩
173 Consultations
0 Téléchargements

Partager

  • More