La sollicitation dans l'interaction exolingue en français

Sammanfattning: The aim of this study is to discuss how ?soliciting? (non-native speakers? requests of native speakers for help in how to express themselves in a foreign language) may play a part in the triggering of SPAs (Séquences Potentiellement Acquisitionnelles or ?learning?teaching sequences?). The beneficial effect of SPAs for learning is still controversial, since no correlation has yet been shown between the occurrence of SPAs and the development of linguistic competence. The present study discusses how the form of the SPA, as an interactional sequence, may vary with the type of soliciting by which it may be triggered. The corpus examined consists of exolingual interactions between six Swedish learners of French and two native speakers of French. The interactions consist of semi-guided interviews, two elicitation tasks and a spoken-translation task (from Swedish to French). After an introductory chapter, situating both the notion of soliciting and the SPA in the general framework of the socio-interactionist perspective on language learning (Chapter 2), a detailed presentation of the corpus analysed is made (Chapter 3). Chapter 4 describes different types of soliciting on which the analyses in Chapters 5 to 7 are based. Chapter 5 deals with the study of the relationship between the different ways of soliciting and the development of interaction. This chapter concludes with a description of the different interactional formats triggered by soliciting. Chapter 6 discusses, in the light of Activity Theory, the relationship between soliciting and task. Since soliciting is considered as an action taken by the learner to reach a goal, the question is whether differences can be seen between tasks and interview in terms of the learners? goals. Chapter 7 is a longitudinal study of soliciting. With reference to the socio-cultural perspective of learning, the question asked is whether a development in terms of the way of soliciting occurs and, if so, whether it has implications for the format of the interactional sequences which develop. A further question which is treated is the relationship between the potential development in soliciting and the development of other competencies (lexical, linguistic and interactional). In this study, a link is shown between the way learners solicit information and the interactional sequences which develop. While requests for information and for judgement/evaluation tend to be followed by SPAs, requests for confirmation are followed by ?limited sequences? where a backchannel signal (hm, oui) constitutes the native speaker's answer. Concerning the impact of context on soliciting, differences have been observed in the way of soliciting which are individual rather than task-related and seem to be related to the learners? goals: while a few learners seem to consider the different types of interaction (tasks, interview) they are engaged in as a potential way of learning, others seem to be motivated simply by completing the task. Finally, a mainly qualitative development as regards soliciting in some of the learners was found in the longitudinal study: while soliciting is mainly done through requests for information in the first interview recordings, an evolution towards requests for confirmation tends to take place in the later recordings. As far as the relationship with other competencies is concerned, no direct parallels could be drawn.