Metadiscursive Activities in Oral Discourse Production in L2 French: A Study on Learner Profiles

Abstract

This study explores the use of discourse markers (DMs) in metadiscursive activities such as word searches, repairs or metalinguistic evaluations that occur during spontaneous oral production. The analysis is based on a corpus of telephone conversations between advanced learners and native speakers of French and draws on functional as well as on interactional work on DM. In a first step, three selected learner profiles provide insight, by means of sequence analysis, into how individual learners make use of their particular DM inventory for their utterance planning, carrying out repairs and expressing attitudes toward their oral production. In a second step, the study compares native and non-native speaker’s DM inventories in order to detect general tendencies in the learners’ DM use that differ from the native speakers’ use of DMs. The comparison of the profiles shows that, even if there is relatively little agreement among the learners regarding the concrete lexical forms of the DMs, similarities can be discerned regarding the interlinguistic characteristics (e.g. individual preferences and overuse in the form of “lexical teddy bears” such as oui, alors or voilà, underuse of typical French reformulation markers like enfin, and weak routine in the lexicalisation of metadiscursive comments).