The present study reports on the effect of study abroad on the choice of request perspectives in formal and informal situations using the intermediary of an open role play test. The study is a longitudinal one involving 24 Ghanaian L2 French learners. At least 12 out of the 24 did a study abroad in France and the other 12 in Benin. Both groups studied for a duration of 10 months in their respective contexts. Additional data included learner’s self-reported volume of interaction in French per day. The main results show that the effect of formality of the context on the choice of request perspectives is only observed after study abroad. This seems to be as a result of their interaction with L1 speakers during study abroad leading to the adoption of native-like use of request perspectives in formal and informal situations.

This study reports data on 47 Tigrinya speaking Eritrean refugees learning French. L2 French proficiency is assessed through the placement test Ev@lang, a standardized grammar test, and fine corpus analyses. Analysis of individual factors shows that, whereas school education, number of years in Switzerland, and French classes attended play no role in proficiency, age penalizes learning and, critically, multilingualism facilitates it. Corpus analyses replicate difficulties commonly reported in the literature with root infinitives, determiner omission and gender errors. Productions also depart from previous reports as we observed a low rate of subject drop, a high rate of gender errors involving animate nouns, and the overuse of the feminine, in line with Tigrinya grammar. Finally, our data provide preliminary evidence of the validity of Ev@lang in assessing French proficiency in refugees, an issue which is becoming critical with the increased role of language skills in European asylum policies.

This study investigates the acquisition of grammatical gender in French by German L1 children (age of onset of acquisition (AO) 2;8-4,0). The analysis of spontaneous production data of 24 children gathered longitudinally and a gender assignment test administered to 8 of these children at ages 6;7-8;3 and to 9 children (AO 2,11-3;8) at ages 3;2-5;1 revealed that some of them resembled L1 learners whereas others behaved like adult L2 learners. The turning point is at around AO 3;6. AO is thus a crucial factor determining successive language acquisition.