Pedagogical Rules and their Relationship to Frequency in the Input: Observational and Empirical Data from L2 French

Abstract

Corpus-based research has shown that the frequency of use of particular grammatical structures and lexis in English is not always congruent with the content or ordering of explicit rules in pedagogical materials. The present study provides an additional example from French, focusing on word-order rules related to adjective position and the (in)congruity of those rules with classroom input and texts written for and by native French speakers. In addition, it demonstrates how this (in)congruity leads to a particular, and particularly nonnativelike, performance on the part of even highly proficient L1 English-speaking learners in their evaluation of the acceptability of contextualized French sentences. This state of affairs leads us to re-examine the debate surrounding native speaker usage as both the basis of pedagogical norms and the goal of foreign language instruction.

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