Gender marking in written L2 French

Amanda Edmonds (1) , Aarnes Gudmestad

1 EMMA - Etudes montpelliéraines du monde anglophone

The aim of this study was to examine how a group of 20 learners of second-language French express gender marking in three written tasks administered over the course of 21 months, including an academic year abroad. All full nouns modified by either a determiner or an adjective overtly marked for gender were analyzed (n = 1,601), and each token was coded for a set of extralinguistic and linguistic features identified in previous literature as playing a role in gender marking. The analysis reveals that targetlike rates of use increased between pre-stay testing and in-stay testing, and that levels were maintained at post-stay. In addition, three factors – time, noun gender, and syllable distance – were found to significantly characterize behavior with respect to gender marking.

Domaines: Littératures

Amanda Edmonds, Aarnes Gudmestad. Gender marking in written L2 French: Before, during, and after residence abroad. Study Abroad Research in Second Language Acquisition and International Education, 2018, 3 (1), pp.58-83. ⟨10.1075/sar.16018.edm⟩. ⟨hal-01984237v1⟩