Figure - uploaded by Véronique Fortier
Content may be subject to copyright.
Number of students and number of group interviews for the main data collection, by language of interview.
Source publication
In 2017, Quebec’s Auditor General reported several major issues regarding government-funded French as a second language (FSL) courses, especially those intended for adult students with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE). To this day, no official framework or program exists for this specific population, a situation that the government o...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... we recruited students in 19 schools, located in nine regions of Quebec. A total of 464 students participated in 107 group interviews in 26 different languages (see Table 1). Students were offered the option of participating in the group interview either in their LO, in a language in which they felt comfortable participating (e.g., a Tuareg speaker joined a group interview conducted in Arabic; moreover, as these cases were marginal, we consider in this article the languages of origin and the languages of the group interview to be the same), or in French (for the students for whom an LO interview was not available and who otherwise felt open to participating in French). ...Citations
... Ethics approval for the study was obtained from the University of Amsterdam ethics committee. Researching LESLLA learners comes with a number of concerns regarding research ethics (Fox et al., 2020;Michaud et al., 2022). Standard ethics procedure are often inappropriate as they heavily rely on literacy and discuss abstract topics such as risks and insurance. ...
The study focuses on the language learning experiences of adult migrants from refugee backgrounds with limited educational experiences before migration. This group is often referred to as LESLLA learners; LESLLA is an acronym for Literacy Education and Second Language Learning for Adults. The study used Constructivist Grounded Theory (CGT) — a data-driven, bottom-up methodology for qualitative research — to gain understanding of the conditions that help or hinder LESLLA learners’ language development and of the strategies they use to enhance learning and to overcome obstacles. The dataset is comprised of thirty interviews with adult refugees from Syria and Eritrea learning Dutch in the Netherlands. The analyses identified self-efficacy, which has been described as ‘the soul of strategies’ ( Oxford, 2017 ), as a core category, differentiating between learners who showed contentment about their language learning achievements and expressed confidence in further learning, and those who expressed little confidence and a sense of failure. Conditions hindering self-efficacy include the cognitive conditions ‘forgetting’ and ‘stress’, and the social condition ‘isolation’. Facilitative conditions in the cognitive realm are ‘motivation’ and ‘language learning strategies’. ‘Social strategies in new social networks’ is the condition that stands out as strongly supportive for self-efficacy. The data showed how LESLLA learners are often not in the position of power to build their networks. This means that social strategies are not an individuals’ asset but rather a condition that is distributed in a social system.
... In many immigrant-receiving countries, language training programs focusing on both literacy education as well as L2 learning are offered to adult learners with little to no formal schooling experiences (e.g., Svenska för invandrare in Sweden, Nederlands leren in Belgium, ESL for adult literacy learners in English-speaking Canada). One of the main characteristics of LESLLA classrooms worldwide is the heterogeneity of learner profiles (see Michaud et al., 2022;Reder, 2015). Indeed, within the same group, there could be students with varying degrees of familiarity with a) formal education (and hence with school ways of thinking and behaving, see DeCapua, 2016), b) print and/or alphabetic literacy, and c) the dominant language of the host society, making it challenging for LESLLA teachers to propose learning activities suited to their learners (Harris, 2022). ...
Despite the growing number of second language adult learners with limited education, few classroom-based studies have investigated how teaching can be better adapted to the characteristics of this population, many of whom have emerging literacy skills ( Penning de Vries et al., 2020 ). This study aims to fill this gap by implementing input-based tasks in an intact French L2 language and literacy classroom ( N = 13). The input-based tasks, targeting household items and number marking, were variations of ‘listen-and-do’ tasks that minimize reliance on print or school-based strategies to achieve task outcomes ( Shintani, 2012 ). To assess whether the tasks provided opportunities for form-meaning connections, we examined learners’ self- and other-directed speech during task performance. Results showed multiple opportunities for form-meaning connections suggesting that input-based instruction could be a useful technique for this context.
Against the backdrop of the critical importance of recognising the specificity of learning languages other than English (LOTEs) in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research, this volume focuses on a state-of-the-art presentation of the research approaches and methods that characterise French as second language (L2) within contemporary SLA research. The presentation problematises those approaches and methods as a critique of what has been done, identifying a methodological roadmap of what needs to be done in order to advance the methodological agenda in L2 French and its contribution to wider SLA research. The discussion further aims to bridge the interface between methodological issues and the research investigation of a specific LOTE, French, such as in terms of its linguistic characterisation and developmental issues underpinning its acquisition. The analysis extends to approaches and methods across different theoretical paradigms in L2 French, in different areas of linguistic development, among learners in different learning contexts.
This paper is concerned with the process of generating informed consent from potential participants who have limited experience of formal education (LESLLA learners) and therefore limited background knowledge of an abstract, culturally-situated concept such as research. We argue that initial efforts to inform these marginalized and vulnerable populations need sharper focus as both these prospective participants and the researchers working with them may not fully appreciate the complex dynamics of researching with each other. Hence, we propose a performative approach to generate awareness and relationships among the researcher and prospective participants. Here, we describe the new materialist performative approach to introduce LESLLA learners to research dynamics through a board game designed to familiarize potential participants with interview situations, while also creating space for considering the agencies of other entities within the research process.
