Project description

This website is the outcome of a series of research projects funded by the Swedish Research council and the Tercentenary foundation of the Bank of Sweden:

  •  French interlanguage – development, interaction and variation, 1992-1995 (HSFR)
  • Processes and strategies in the acquisition of French, 1995-1999 (HSFR)
  • The faculty programme in Acquisition of a second language, 1998-2001 (SU)
  • Developmental stages in French L2, 2003-2006 (The Swedish research council, VR)
  • High Level Proficiency in Second language use, 2006-2009 (The Tercentary Foundation of the Bank of Sweden, RJ)
  • High Level Proficiency in Second language use, 2010-2011 (RJ)

The long term goal of the projects is to promote research in the field of French L2 second language acquisition in a developmental, interactional and variationist perspective. The HLP project also investigates learners of other L2s such as Swedish, Spanish, English and Italian (see http://www.biling.su.se/forskning/forskningsprojekt/avslutade-projekt/programmet-aaa).

 

The design of the InterFra corpus – short history

In the early nineties we started to collect the ‘core’ of the InterFra corpus (Interlangue française – développement, interaction and variation)(see I in Outline). The first group to be recorded was the university group, the longitudinal and the cross-sectional sub-corpora. We then collected data from the ‘group of Rennes’ (future teachers) in 1992, followed by the secondary school students, the beginners at the university and, finally, in this first phase, the native control group of French ERASMUS students at Stockholm university. This InterFra core corpus thus contains instructed and semi-instructed learners, since some of them have spent important periods of residence in a French speaking country. These groups are called ‘French as a foreign language groups’, the FFL groups.

In a second phase more ‘natural’ and advanced learners/users were recorded (see II in Outline). These groups are called ‘French as a second language’, the FSL groups. All the sub-corpora were collected at Stockholm university and in Paris.

The contents of the database are meant to be available to the research community in the form of digital audio files and related transcripts formatted using XML software.

InterFra is now available on the following address which is located at KORP, Språkbanken, University of Göteborg: http://spraakbanken.gu.se/swe/resurs/interfra.