Secondary school and sixth form learners’ performance in spoken interaction in French as a foreign language

Abstract

This study first reviews literature on the acquisition of spoken interaction by learners of a foreign language. It studies whether and to what extent Maltese learners of French as a foreign language manage to acquire sensitivity to the four main characteristics of spoken interaction according to the communicative situation, namely by adapting their speech as regards: formality/informality; competition/cooperation; finalised/non finalised interactions and symmetry/complementarity. Role play topics were proposed to learners in order to allow recordings of these three types of spoken interaction: conversation, transaction and a dispute. These topics were proposed to secondary school and advanced learners to see whether comparisons suggest progress in the acquisition of spoken interaction techniques, and also to native speakers who were the control group. The learners’ realisations prove to be quite artificial compared to the native speakers’, although progress in a smoother running of the interactions was noticed at Advanced Level. This study is therefore a corpus-based, qualitative interactional analysis, the emphasis having been on interpretation and discussion of results.