Laboratoire de Linguistique et Didactique des Langues Etrangères et Maternelles

This paper provides an overview of the main findings from a European-wide on-line survey of English pronunciation teaching practices. Both quantitative and qualitative data from seven countries (Finland, France, Germany, Macedonia, Poland, Spain and Switzerland) are presented, focusing on teachers' comments about: ● their own pronunciation, ● their training, ● their learners’ goals, skills, motivation and aspirations, ● their preferences for certain varieties (and their perception of their students' preferences). The results of EPTiES reveal interesting phenomena across Europe, despite shortcomings in terms of construction and distribution. For example, most respondents are non-native speakers of English and the majority of them rate their own mastery of English pronunciation favourably. However, most feel they had little or no training in how to teach pronunciation, which begs the question of how teachers are coping with this key aspect of language teaching. In relation to target models, RP remains the variety of English which teachers claim to use, whilst recognizing that General American might be preferred by some students. Differences between countries are explored, especially via replies to open-ended questions, allowing a more nuanced picture to emerge for each country. Other survey research is also referred to, in order to contextualise the analyses and implications for teaching English and for training English teachers.

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Abstract This article discusses the informal learning of English by non-native speakers with particular reference to the role of virtual communities. The concept of informal learning is presented and related to current areas of interest in the literature such as incidental learning, and dynamic systems theory. Our research investigates how non-specialist language learners use the Internet in their spare time to read and listen to English, and also communicate in English, notably in online communities through social networking websites. The study looks particularly at the dynamics of these phenomena by studying a small number of non-native users of English over a period of two months. The results of this research will be used to question the relevance of the learner autonomy paradigm, which has been a cornerstone of language learning policy in Europe for the past thirty years.

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Abstract The paper critically discusses key theoretical concepts and definitions attached to the notion of a 'plurilingual social actor', and assesses their impact and implications for European language policies and for the development of plurilingualism and citizenship in schools. Keywords: pluringual social actorrepertoireplurilingual competenceplural identityCouncil of Europelanguage policy Acknowledgements We would like to thank Fredia Woolf (Boston) and our anonymous assessors for their useful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Notes 1. It is not our intention here to offer an elaborate conception of the social actor. Let us simply justify our preference of theoretical models of reference regarding the term 'plurilingual social actor'. Without entering into a hot sociological debate (which has become ideological and political) for which we are by no means qualified, let us say that our affinity lies rather with Giddens (Citation1984) than with Bourdieu (both attempt to link the actor or individual agent and social structures). Of particular interest to us is the importance, the former attaches to the definition and roles of different types of reflexivity in the relationship between the individual and social structure. Within an educational perspective, and without necessarily adhering to Giddens' political position, his model of the social agent seems more dynamic and more 'positive' in terms of the possibilities for individual development and social change. De Singly (Citation2006) points out that Giddens has not been widely acclaimed in France and explicit references to his thought are few and far between within the field of sociology here, but this does not mean, of course, that his influence is not perceptible. 2. We maintain in theory, that in European societies, and more broadly speaking in contemporary 'western' societies, all socialisation is also a process of individualisation. In particular, education systems defend educational plans and projects aimed at educating and producing responsible and autonomous individuals and not conformists, identical to one another. But this process of individualisation functions only when an interactive relationship is established with social entities and environments. 3. In order to lighten our terminology, 'socialisation' will often, in the following parts of this article, be used as referring de facto to 'socialisation/individualisation'. 4. Communities (affiliation communities – those to which we belong – or reference communities – those we aspire to belong to). 'Community' here may refer to different types of grouping: national or regional, ethnic or religious, professional, scientific, etc. 5. Our translation into English of the French text defining «répertoire» as an «Ensemble d'unités linguistiques et de lois d'assemblage de ces unités (phonologiques, morpho-syntaxiques, lexico-sémantiques) dont dispose le sujet pour décoder la parole. Cette notion fait référence à la connaissance plus ou moins consciente que le sujet a de sa langue». 6. Our translation from the French: Le bilinguisme c'est «la faculté de recourir à deux ou plusieurs langues et le bilingue est la personne qui se sert régulièrement de deux langues dans la vie de tous les jours». 7. If we bring to mind certain International movements like ATTAC International (Association pour la Taxation des Transactions pour l'Aide aux Citoyens), which make a claim to world citizenship. 8. But the opposite, is of course also possible! 9. The Guide for the development of language education policies in Europe (Beacco & Byram, Citation2007) suggests many other lines along which to pursue this work. It is worth noting in particular the diversified approaches which may be grouped under the generic name of 'language awareness' (cf. Candelier, Citation2003a; De Pietro, Citation2005) and those mentioned by both Cavalli (Citation2005) and Moore (Citation2006), and, in a slightly different perspective, Gajo (Citation2001). 10. Without making any hasty amalgamations or over-generalising, it is nonetheless useful to bring to mind theories of identity and the continual and on-going process of identification, these being influenced and determined by narrativity, the reflection, the relationship to 'otherness'. The reference to Ricoeur's work, then, and his analyses (Ricoeur, Citation1990) may be disproportionate, but is certainly illuminating. 11. Some of these are discussed in publications, such as Billiez (Citation1998), Castellotti (Citation2001), Castellotti et al. (Citation2008), Cavalli (Citation2005), Mochet et al. (Citation2005), Moore (Citation2006), Perregaux et al. (Citation2003), Prudent, Tupin, and Wharton (Citation2005) and Simon and Sabatier (Citation2003) amongst others.

<titre>R&#233;sum&#233;</titre>Les collocations constituent une th&#233;matique essentielle dans les ph&#233;nom&#232;nes de combinatoire lexicale, mais restent souvent d&#233;finies de fa&#231;on floue. Dans cet article, notre premier objectif est de proposer une d&#233;finition plus claire du ph&#233;nom&#232;ne, en nous appuyant sur des param&#232;tres rendant compte du degr&#233; de figement. Nous pr&#233;sentons ensuite quelques caract&#233;ristiques syntaxiques, puis quelques m&#233;canismes s&#233;mantiques productifs dans la gen&#232;se des collocations imag&#233;es. Nous distinguons enfin les collocations de notions voisines.

Abstract Sociolinguistic studies have shown that linguistic usage is closely related to social relationships and interactions between individuals. This has been established in adults and adolescents but developmental studies involving children are lacking. This paper studies whether and how peers influence the acquisition of social dialects in young children by using direct observations and quantitative analyses of spontaneous peer interactions and relationships at kindergarten. The longitudinal follow-up of one group of French-speaking children 4 to 5 years of age shows that the individual scores of sociolinguistic variables converge after one year of frequent contact. Moreover, we find that children who interact more frequently adopt similar usage of sociolinguistic variables, whereas other factors have no influence (teacher's speech, child's awareness of standard sociolinguistics norms, reported interpersonal attraction). These results provide the first evidence that social interactions within the peer group do have an influence on children's linguistic usage through daily interactions at an early age.

Des études récentes, essentiellement fondées sur des expérimentations, ont précisé les relations entre l'usage enfantin des liaisons, les erreurs commises par les enfants et la segmentation des mots nouveaux. Alors que les auteurs s'accordent sur les faits, ils divergent sur les facteurs explicatifs susceptibles de rendre compte des étapes développementales. Chevrot, Dugua et Fayol (2005) défendent une approche basée sur l'usage alors que Wauquier-Gravelines (2005) et Wauquier-Gravelines et Braud (2005) soutiennent une conception dans laquelle le développement est guidé par les principes universels de la grammaire. Les données issues de trois études de cas confirment et clarifient les résultats expérimentaux. Deux types d'effets de fréquence soutiennent l'approche basée sur l'usage.

International audience

La liaison est un phenomene de la phonologie du francais, qui consiste a prononcer une consonne (/n/, /z/ ou /t/ dans la majorite des cas) entre deux mots si le deuxieme mot commence par une voyelle initiale (les [z] ecrans) quand il est prononce en isolation. Dans bien des contextes cependant, il est possible de prononcer ces sequences aussi bien avec liaison que sans liaison (ainsi dans [z] enfin). Cette variabilite confere a la liaison un caractere de complexite, qui depuis les annees 40, ne cesse d’intriguer les chercheurs. A date recente, la constitution de grands corpus oraux, tel PFC (Phonologie du Francais Contemporain) a relance l’etude de la liaison. Le present ouvrage propose une revue a la fois large et precise des dernieres recherches dans le domaine, d’un point de vue aussi bien linguistique que psycholinguistique et sociolinguistique. Il rend compte d’etudes nouvelles sur le traitement de la liaison dans la communication orale, mais aussi en production ecrite ou chez des personnes atteintes de pathologies du langage. Il s’adresse tant aux specialistes qu’aux etudiants en sciences du langage desireux de s’instruire a propos de ce phenomene phare de la phonologie du francais.

Les participes, telle est la partie importante du discours qui va nous occuper ; les participes, l'pouvantail des enfants, la ressource consolante de l'ignorant pdagogue, le sujet de mditation du vrai grammairien ! (Bescherelle, Bescherelle et Litais de Gaux, Grammaire nationale, 1852, p. 667)

Recent works in spoken language translation (SLT) have attempted to build end-to-end speech-to-text translation without using source language transcription during learning or decoding. However, while large quantities of parallel texts (such as Europarl, OpenSubtitles) are available for training machine translation systems, there are no large (100h) and open source parallel corpora that include speech in a source language aligned to text in a target language. This paper tries to fill this gap by augmenting an existing (monolingual) corpus: LibriSpeech. This corpus, used for automatic speech recognition, is derived from read audiobooks from the LibriVox project, and has been carefully segmented and aligned. After gathering French e-books corresponding to the English audio-books from LibriSpeech, we align speech segments at the sentence level with their respective translations and obtain 236h of usable parallel data. This paper presents the details of the processing as well as a manual evaluation conducted on a small subset of the corpus. This evaluation shows that the automatic alignments scores are reasonably correlated with the human judgments of the bilingual alignment quality. We believe that this corpus (which is made available online) is useful for replicable experiments in direct speech translation or more general spoken language translation experiments.

In the linguistics field, liaison in French is interpreted as an indicator of interactions between the various levels of language organization. The current study examines the same issue while adopting a developmental perspective. Five experiments involving children aged two to six years provide evidence for a developmental scenario which interrelates a number of different issues: the acquisition of phonological alternations, the segmentation of new words, the long-term stabilization of the word form in the lexicon and the formation of item-based constructions. According to this scenario, children favour the presence of initial CV syllables when segmenting stored chunks of speech of the type word1-liaison-word2 (les arbres 'the trees' is segmented as /le/+/zarbr/). They cope with the variation of the liaison in the input by memorizing multiple exemplars of the same word2 (/zarbr/, /narbr/). They learn the correct relations between the word1s and the word2 exemplars through exposure to the well-formed sequence (un+/narbr/, deux+/zarbr/). They generalize the relation between a word1 and a class of word2 exemplars beginning with a specific liaison consonant by integrating this information into an item-based schema (e.g. un+/nX/, deux+/zX/). This model is based on the idea that the segmentation of new words and the development of syntactic schemas are two aspects of the same process.

International audience

De précédents travaux ont permis de dégager différentes façons de parler le français à Marseille, caractérisées par plusieurs traits. Parmi ceux-ci, l’affrication/palatalisation des dentales /t/ et /d/ semble être un trait largement partagé, et n’être donc pas limitée au seul « accent des quartiers nord », qui serait l’apanage de jeunes des quartiers populaires de la ville. L’observation de la production et de la perception de ce trait auprès de locuteurs de milieux sociaux différenciés semble montrer que sa distribution est plus complexe que prévu – ce qui témoigne sans doute d’importants changements en cours – et que sa signification sociale, loin d’être univoque, dépend beaucoup de la légitimité des locuteurs. Grâce à une enquête de terrain, à l’analyse de productions et de discours épilinguistiques, cet article essaie de montrer en quoi ce trait phonétique a priori stigmatisé est en fait révélateur de processus de changements sociaux et linguistiques, liés aux changements de la ville elle-même.

Child sex and family socioeconomic status (SES) have been repeatedly identified as a source of inter-individual variation in language development; yet their interactions have rarely been explored. While sex differences are the focus of a renewed interest concerning emerging language skills, data remain scarce and are not consistent across preschool years. The questions of whether family SES impacts boys and girls equally, as well as of the consistency of these differences throughout early childhood, remain open. We evaluated consistency of sex differences across SES and age by focusing on how children (N = 262), from 2;6 to 6;4 years old, from two contrasting social backgrounds, acquire a frequent phonological alternation in French - the liaison. By using a picture naming task eliciting the production of obligatory liaisons, we found evidence of sex differences over the preschool years in low-SES children, but not between high-SES boys and girls whose performances were very similar. Low-SES boys' performances were the poorest whereas low-SES girls' performances were intermediate, that is, lower than those of high-SES children of both sexes but higher than those of low-SES boys. Although all children's mastery of obligatory liaisons progressed with age, our findings showed a significant impeding effect of low-SES, especially for boys.

Lexique transversal et formules discursives des sciences humaines propose une synthèse de travaux menés autour du lexique scientifique transdisciplinaire (LST) en français, c'est-à-dire le lexique employé par les auteurs scientifiques pour décrire et conceptualiser les résultats de leurs recherches. Propre au genre, par-delà les disciplines, ce LST est indispensable à la recherche et à l'écriture scientifique, essentiellement dans les disciplines des sciences humaines.Cet ouvrage présente une description des caractéristiques lexicales et discursives des écrits de recherche en sciences humaines. Sont abordées les propriétés sémantiques, syntaxiques et discursives du lexique et de la phraséologie de ce genre. Figurent en annexes un inventaire des unités lexicales transdisciplinaires, ainsi que des classes sémantiques organisant cet inventaire. L’ouvrage sera donc particulièrement utile aux enseignants et aux étudiants soucieux de comprendre les rouages de l’écriture de recherche dans des disciplines variées.

Data-driven learning (DDL), introduced in 1990 by Tim Johns, has come in multiple guises ranging from “serendipitous corpus exploration” (Boulton, 2020, p. xiv) to focus on preselected linguistic aspects. When the focus is on pre-selected linguistic aspects, teachers’ guidance may vary for a mere suggestion of what lexical/grammatical items to focus on to a detailed pre-processing of the raw concordance lines combined with a scaffolded pedagogical guidance in the exercises presented to their pupils or students. Thirty years after its inception, DDL has evolved in many ways in terms of the variety of approaches used, the types of corpora used, and the targeted end users of DDL. Examples include Corino and Onesti’s (2019) DDL use in Content and Language Integrated Learning; Friginal and Roberts, this volume, for the use of DDL in language for specific purposes and more specifically aviation English; Crosthwaite (2020) for an opening to less advanced learners; Boulton and Cobb (2017) for an evolution towards more online access. What has not evolved, however, is that DDL is still mainly conceptualised as the analysis of written concordance lines (even in case of transcribed speech) on screen (e.g. electronic handouts, connections to online concordancers) or on paper (e.g. classroom handouts, concordance lines in textbooks). Surprisingly, the numerous advances in digital technology over the last 20 years (e.g. multimodality, mobility, etc.) have largely been absent from DDL research and applications (Hirata, 2020; Coccetta, this volume, for exceptions). It is, thus, high time to reconsider oft-quoted definitions of DDL, such as that proposed by Gilquin and Granger (2010, p. 359) saying that “Data-driven learning (DDL) consists in using the tools and techniques of corpus linguistics for pedagogical purposes” or by Boulton (2011), who states, “the hands-on use of authentic corpus data (concordances) by advanced, sophisticated foreign or second language learners in higher education for inductive, self-directed language learning of advanced usage” (p. 572). Such definitions have become too narrow as they limit the boundaries of DDL to the tools and techniques of corpus linguistics, and somehow exclude an opening to other tools that have strong pedagogical potential for DDL. Another issue is that such definitions seem to target mostly advanced users. Also, the focus in such definitions seems to be on corpus linguistics first and pedagogy second, whilst I believe – in line with Kolb (2017) – that it should be ‘Learning First, Technology Second’, or even pedagogy first, technology second. Pushing the boundaries of DDL would in no way betray the key concepts behind datadriven learning as initially conceptualised by Johns (1990) – i.e. learning driven by data – but it would definitely no longer ignore a number of current affordances that were not available at the inception of DDL; it would also give pedagogy the central position it deserves. In the coming sections, the fundamentals of DDL are presented (Section 23.2) together with the reasons for revamping DDL and scaling it up to include the affordances of current digital technology and pedagogy (Section 23.3). Section 23.4 presents concrete recommendations and examples for practice, and Section 23.5 suggests future directions for research.

Sociolinguists study the interaction between language and society. Variationist sociolinguistics - the subfield of sociolinguistics which is the focus of this issue - uses empirical and quantitative methods to study the production and perception of linguistic variation. Linguistic variation refers to how speakers choose between linguistic forms that say the same thing in different ways, with the variants differing in their social meaning. For example, how frequently someone says fishin' or fishing depends on a number of factors, such as the speaker's regional and social background and the formality of the speech event. Likewise, if listeners are asked to use a rating scale make judgements about speakers who say fishin' or fishing, their ratings depend on what other social characteristics are attributed to the speaker. This issue aims to reflect the growing number of interactions that bring variationist sociolinguistics into contact of different branches of cognitive science. After presenting current trends in sociolinguistics, we identify five areas of contact between the two fields: cognitive sociolinguistics, sociolinguistic cognition, acquisition of variation, computational modeling, and a comparative approach of variation in animal communication. We then explain the benefits of interdisciplinary work: fostering the study of variability and cultural diversity in cognition; bringing together data and modeling; understanding the cognitive mechanisms through which sociolinguistic variation is processed; examining indexical meaning; exploring links between different levels of grammar; and improving methods of data collection and analysis. Finally we explain how the articles in this issue contribute to each of these benefits. We conclude by suggesting that sociolinguistics holds a strategic position for facing the challenge of building theories of language through integrating its linguistic, cognitive, and social aspects at the collective and individual levels.