Some Reflections on Reference in the Teaching of French as A Foreign Language Context

Tsaknaki Olympia
Eidikos Logariasmos Kondilion Erevnas A.p.th.

Abstract

According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), grammatical and lexical cohesion is one of the necessary conditions to guarantee text’s coherence. Grammatical cohesion has the following types of relation: reference, conjunction, substitution and ellipsis. This study aims to investigate the use of the grammatical cohesive device of reference by users/learners of French as a foreign language, to explore the kind of references they prefer (anaphoric and cataphoric) and to highlight the difficulties they face. Reference is the set of grammatical resources that allow the speaker to indicate whether something is repeated from somewhere earlier in the text, or whether it has not yet repeated in the text (Thompson 2004). Our study is based on a learner corpus composed of written productions of Greek-speaking candidates who participated in National Foreign Language Examinations (Κρατικό Πιστοποιητικό Γλωσσομάθειας) in French. The corpus is enriched in an ongoing basis to maintain a balance in the representation of proficiency levels (A1-C2), types of tasks, text types and communicative contexts to which candidates are asked to respond using the foreign language. Greek is the common language of all test takers. It is worth noting that the candidates taking these exams differ in their age group and literacy level. They also come from different regions and educational environments. According to the Council of Europe (2020:140), users/learners: “Can create coherent and cohesive text making full and appropriate use of a variety of organizational patterns and a wide range of cohesive devices.” in Level C2 and “Can produce clear, smoothly flowing, well-structured language, showing controlled use of organizational patterns, connectors and cohesive devices. Can produce well-organised, coherent text, using a variety of cohesive devices and organisational patterns.” in Level C1. In the present study, we use data from written productions of level C and we compare it with data from the levels A and B in order to reveal the differences and the variety in the organization and complexity of reference in discourse. Council of Europe (2020) Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: learning, teaching, assessment. Companion Volume with new descriptors. Halliday M. A. K. & Ruqaiya Hasan (1976) Cohesion in English. London: Longman Group Ltd. Thompson G. (2004) Introducing Functional Grammar (2nd ed.). London: Arnold.

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