Acquiring sociolinguistic awareness and competence in a foreign language: The case of French
While modern linguistics mostly agree on a variationnist perspective of language, this is not necessarily the case in foreign language teaching. The present contribution addresses students‘ acquisition of sociolinguistic variation in the target language French. This is a fairly understudied area of research which, because of the different sociolinguistic history of French, is likely to yield different results from research on English.
Our aim is to investigate which kinds of attitudes and knowledge about variation are fostered by French classroom instruction. Since teachers‘ answers to this question are likely to be biased (due to social desirability and other factors), we will rather rely on what can be considered the “outcome” of their teaching, i.e. French learners‘ awareness, knowledge and evaluation of nonstandard varieties. We will close our talk presenting various didactic approaches which could contribute to the promotion of learners’ (socio-)linguistic awareness and competence.
Linguistics and Knowledge about Language in Education 