Werkgroep Over Taal (WOT)

Phraseological complexity in L2 French: Investigating variation across modes

Presentation by Nathan Vandeweerd, June 30th, 2022

Along with accuracy and fluency, complexity is considered a major component of L2 performance and proficiency (Housen et al., 2012; Housen & Kuiken, 2009; Skehan, 1996, 2009). Until recently, however, most measures of complexity have focused on solely lexical or syntactic aspects of L2 production, disregarding the important role that word combinations play in the development of linguistic competence. The construct of phraseological complexity (Paquot, 2019) addresses this by measuring complexity at the interface of lexis and grammar. In various studies, measures of phraseological diversity (e.g., type-token ratios of phraseological units) and sophistication (e.g., average PMI of phraseological units) have been found to be useful indices of L2 proficiency (e.g., Jiang et al., 2021; Paquot, 2018, 2019; Rubin et al., 2021) and development (e.g., Bestgen & Granger, 2018; Siyanova-Chanturia, 2015). With a few exceptions however, research in this domain has focused predominantly on L2 English, and so relatively little is known about the applicability of phraseological complexity measures to more synthetic languages such as French. In addition, while a handful of studies have investigated phraseological complexity measures in the oral mode (e.g. Paquot et al., in press), there has not yet been an attempt to compare phraseological complexity across modes. This is important because modality may effect both the type of phraseological units used (Biber et al., 2004) as well as the ability to pay attention to linguistic output, which is hypothesized to lead to generally higher levels of complexity in writing as compared to speaking (Kormos, 2014; Manchón, 2014; Skehan, 2014).

While research in L2 French has shown that learners use a higher quantity of phraseological units as they increase in proficiency (e.g. Forsberg, 2010), no study thus far has compared phraseological complexity (in terms of diversity and sophistication) across proficiency levels in L2 French or examined the effect of mode (speech vs. writing) on the manifestation of phraseological complexity. This project fills the gap by investigating the extent to which phraseological complexity is an indicator of proficiency and development in L2 French (RQ1), the extent to which phraseological complexity measures relate to other aspects of linguistic complexity (i.e. syntactic, lexical and morphological) in L2 French (RQ2) and the extent to which phraseological complexity differs in oral versus written L2 production (RQ3).

These questions are addressed in a series of empirical studies using both cross-sectional and longitudinal corpora of matched oral and written tasks by the same learners. Overall, the results show that in L2 French, both phraseological and non-phraseological complexity measures are significant predictors of proficiency level (as established independently on the basis of expert raters’ holistic proficiency assessments) and that phraseological complexity develops gradually over time. However, in both cases, these effects are small and appear to be moderated by both communicative function and the constraints of online production in speech. These findings speak to the importance of a more ‘organic’ approach to complexity (Norris & Ortega, 2009) that takes into account the effect of aspects such as target language or modality when interpreting the meaning of complexity measures.