An Investigation of How a French Speaker Uses English as Their Second Language When Writing.
In my English Language coursework investigation I shall be examining 7 e-mails from a French girl, Francesca Pacchiarotti, a French student learning English as her second language.
The aim of my assignment is to examine the way in which Francesca uses English language as her second language in the written form and also identify common problems she has with the English language.
Second Language Learning.
New language acquisition is a lot easier the younger you are and this is because of the innate language acquisition ability that is present in children. Another explanation for this is because younger people have little to focus on whereas older people have many other responsibilities and occupations. However, in England, we tend not to have access to a foreign language until high school and at this stage language acquisition becomes harder because they do not have regular access to it, possibly once or twice a week.
Nothing will ever make learning languages easy' this was said be Henry Sweet in 1899 and to this day nothing has been invented to make learning a language, even one's first, any easier. It just requires attention and a lot of energy along with a lot of determination.
Francesca has quite a bit of access to English but when learning a second language, like English, you have nowhere near the amount that a native speaker would have. There is not the constant interaction and they will neither hear nor speak much out of the classroom. Thus, progress often seems to be slow.
Language interference is a major problem. Francesca is a fluent French speaker, she will therefore use different grammatical and constructional rule that cannot just be forgotten when applying them to a new language. Another problem, which Francesca even pointed out in one of her later e-mails, is that of idioms. Idioms are the linguistic usage that is grammatical and natural to native speakers of a language, therefore Francesca will not have the knowledge of these idioms as a native speaker would.
