Comtextualisation techniques for the readier mastery of modern French vocabulary by English-speakers at senior undergraduate and postgraduate levels , with special reference to etymological and word frequency aspects
Paul Cannon
Supervisor: Prof. Jean-Michel Picard,
Reasons for choice of the topic
Having MAs in French, German,Philosophy and roughly BA-level competence in Swedish, Norwegian and Italian, I think I am in a position to suggest an approach to the more advanced second language (L2) teaching requirements for educated Anglophone adults. The plethora of glossy, expensive, manuals , particularly popular in Cultural Institutes and Continental Summer Schools, suffer from the following defects, I submit. But the weaknesses are creeping into the universities.
- Examples chosen to illustrate grammatical and idiomatic points are boring or just fragments of a message.
- Grammar needs a full manual : fragments, coyly introduced, fail to convey theprinciples underlying the,
- English speakers encounter special challenges that hinder and help the mastery of relatable languages. And many learners have English as an L2.
- There seems to be a divorce between (a) the systematic approach to applied linguistics in terms of corpora and numerical data and (b) a balanced, neasurable, approach to vocabulary mastery in intersting contexts.
- Modern teachers seem reluctant to point to the etymologically determined interlingual or statistical approach. (And this is understandable for many immigrant learners' first language is not 'Indo- European' in origin. And it is forgotten that Latin and Greek abound in English and French to the estent that the reader is not seriously disadvataged by absence of school Latin or Greek.
- There is failure to point to rarer , but current English words, whose mastery enriches the sense spectrum of French as well as stimulating a greater interest in English vocabulary.
- The manuals and associated textbooks for L2 learning do not cater significantly for the level I have in mind. A baby learning to speak relies in simple denotation to a large extent. 'Necessry' Words for floor, chair, bread, milk . are heard frequently and readily picked up. But analysis, along the lines suggested, of English words like EARNEST (in the sense of a pledge), WINNOW, RETRIBUTION, BLEAK (the fish) ENTAIL do not sit comfortably in the child's or adolescent's mental lexicon. Hence the approach to French in my thesis. mutatis mutandis.
Funding
As 'trawling' dictionaries and checking word frequency data, not to
mention searches for telling quotations embedding harder words, are
time-consuming, I would appreciate help to finance someone to join in
and check the search aspect. UCD has funded access to FRANTEXT
following my approach to Professor Picard. Otherwise I fund myself. But I should like to complete this work before my demise, apart from
the actual PhD. Besides, other language candidates might like to apply
what I might term my thinking to other main European languages. For a
given L2 the study is interdisciplinary, uniting interlingual,
literary. grammatical, historical and comuter approaches.
Conferences and Publications
I have read papers on the above topic area to the Alliance Francaise in Kilkenny, meetings of the relevant national committee of the RIA (of which I am a member) and a secondary school. Publications are to be found in Translation Ireland.
