Some Reflections on Reference in the Teaching of French as a Foreign Language Context

Abstract

Grammatical and lexical cohesion are necessary conditions to guarantee a text’s coherence (Halliday and Hasan 1976). Grammatical cohesion is classified into four types of relation: reference, conjunction, substitution, and ellipsis. This study aims to investigate the use of the cohesive device of reference in written discourse produced by users/learners of French as a foreign language, to explore the kind of references they prefer and to highlight the difficulties they come across. Our study is based on a learner corpus composed of written productions of Greek-speaking users/learners of French who participated in National Foreign Language Exam System. We used a sample of texts produced by candidates who participated in the examination willing to be certified at the levels B (Independent user) and C (Proficient user) of language proficiency according to the 6-level scale of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe 2001).