Subject-verb agreement and fluency markers in French as a second language

Thanks to the increasing accessibility of large oral corpora, the analysis of hesitation phenomena, which we will refer to as “marqueurs du travail de formulation” (markers of formulation work), has caught the attention of many researchers and has been apprehended from various angles, often of cognitive inspiration. As far as French is concerned, there is an important literature devoted to (dis)fluency of native speakers (see among others Candea 2000), but for French L2 learners there are less studies, often characterized by a broad aim, for example regarding discourse organization and the ability to create a more or less fluent discourse (see among others studies conducted by Hilton and by Towell). The aim of our study will be more precise: we will examine the presence of hesitation phenomena in the oral productions of Dutch-speaking learners of French as a second language (FL2) in order to identify the appropriation processes of verbal morphology, specifically the conjugation and subject-verb agreement in the 3rd person of the present indicative and the perfect indicative. First, we will briefly present the results of previous research, then outline our methodology and interpret the obtained results.

Keywords:French as a second/foreign language, Second Language Acquisition, fluency, subject-verb agreement

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