This article first presents an overview of some trends behind the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation in a second language. A study is then presented that aims to test the validity of these trends in a quantitative study of a range of socio- and morpho-phonetic variables in French, including liaison, /l/ deletion, and subject-verb agreement…

Reviews three European corpus comparison studies and their findings are replicated with a corpus of Quebec learners writing. Pedagogical implications are proposed. (Author/VWL)

Reviews literature on cross-cultural reading, interlanguage, and story grammar against the theory of contrastive rhetoric, and considers implications for teaching reading to advanced second language students. The conclusion is that comparative rhetoric demands levels of cultural sensitivity in teachers that transcend any one theory or approach.…

Examines the inferencing procedures used by university-level second language (L2) learners of French to guess at the meaning of unfamiliar words in a written L2 text. The article combines qualitative and quantitative research methodologies and compares the strategies used by students assessed as high or low in French proficiency relative to their…