Difficulties encountered by French learners of English, with a focus on tense/aspect and word order

Abstract

Studying Second Language Acquisition (SLA) may produce interesting insights into how a second language is acquired and what problems learners face when learning a new language. In particular, the difficulties encountered by the learners as they struggle to express themselves in a foreign language that differs from their native language, might reveal the extent to which native language interference can be seen as at least as one important source of these difficulties. This dissertation looks at the difficulties French native speakers and learners of English encounter, hypothesizing that they encounter particular problems with tense and aspect, and word order. In order to test this hypothesis and examine in some detail the difficulties that French learners of English encounter in these areas of grammar, spoken and written data have been collected through the use of questionnaires, the setting of specific language tasks and audio recorded interviews. The ten participants’ responses to the different tasks (four in total) show that aspect and tense were of particular difficulty for them, especially the past tense. It appears that, at least in some cases, native language interference could be the reason for the observed difficulties. In contrast, despite a few mistakes, word order does not appear to have created significant difficulties for the learners in this study. This study should be considered as a pilot study which can help to inform future research on second language acquisition, in general, and on the acquisition of English by French speakers, in particular.