La subordination dans la production écrite en français L2  : Étude sur l’acquisition de la subordination en français L2 chez dix lycéens suédophones

Sammanfattning: Abstract   The aim of this study is to examine the use of subordinate clauses in the written production of second language French by ten Swedish-speaking learners at an upper secondary school/a senior high school. The learners’ general level of development has been evaluated by means of the automatic analyzer of texts Direkt Profil constructed by Granfeldt, J., Nugues, P et al at the University of Lund. In the first part, a transversal study of 30 texts written by ten learners during three months (August – October 2009), has resulted in the proposal of the following acquisitional sequence concerning the subordinate clauses : qui  > quand > que-complétif > parce que > que-relatif > si/même si > comme > où. We propose that the relative clause introduced by qui is to be regarded as the first step and a great number of these clauses in our corpus are so called prefabricated chunks, learned in their entirety, as for example : qui s’appelle... or qui a ... ans. Concerning the nominal subordinate clause introduced by que, we suspect a certain influence from the Swedish language as the conjunction is omitted in several cases.  Our proposed acquisitional sequence is compared with the acquisitional sequence concerning syntactic complexity proposed by Inge Bartning and Suzanne Schlyter, which is based on spoken French of adult Swedish-speaking learners. We notice an earlier and more frequent use of subordinations in our written material than has been proposed by Bartning and Schlyter for their spoken material. In the second part, the longitudinal study, the individual development of five of the ten learners, whose texts have been studied also in the first part, is examined. The material has been completed with three more texts from each learner and it covers eigth months of the first year at the upper secondary school/the senior high school (August 2009 – April 2010). We notice a clear increase of subordinate clauses in the texts of all the five learners, in spite of the fact that the evaluation of their general level of lingustic development (according to Direkt Profil) shows that three of five learners are at the same level of development in April 2010, as they were in August 2009. We also see that our proposed acquisitional sequence is valid for the learners at the lower level while the learners at an advanced level construct other types of subordinate clauses than those which occurred in the corpus of the transversal part of our study.