Second-language learners at the university level are very often not exposed to language variation-in terms of register/formality, regionalisms, marginalized language varieties, etc.-until they are in upper-level courses. Instructors often report waiting to talk about these concepts in order to avoid confusing their students with too many competing forms.
However, there are two main problems with this approach. First, most students never make it to those upper-level courses, many of which may not afford time to delve into linguistic variation anyway. Second, the lack of exposure to variation reinforces prescriptivist language ideologies that say that there is one "correct" way to say something in a language, and that other variants are not as good. We know from copious research on language attitudes that judgments about someone's speech often lead to judgments about their character, socioeconomic standing, and more (e.g., Labov 1972).
One of the most basic concepts of linguistics, however, is that no aspect of language is inherently good or bad. With this in mind, it is essential to expose L2 learners to variation early in their acquisitional process, so as to combat prescriptivism and the judgments and prejudice it can lead to. Following the research that has already been done on how stylistic variation is taught and acquired (e.g., Etienne & Sax 2009), I argue that in contrast to waiting until upper-level courses to discuss variation, it is much more accurate, inclusive, and helpful to show students the wide range of possible styles, forms, and structures they may encounter in the real world, in the proportion that they exist in the real world.
Starting in my first-semester French language classes, I teach variation in both the grammar and lexicon of French. In this presentation, I will discuss the benefits of exposing language learners to this type of variation as early as the first or second semester in a language sequence. I will explain how I teach grammatical variation in particular, and how I incorporate findings from linguistic research into my teaching. I will use examples of grammatical phenomena from French, such as interrogative structures (e.g., Dewaele 1999), using on vs. nous to mean 'we' (Dewaele 2002; Sax 2003), and the deletion of the negative particle ne (Martineau & Mougeon 2003:146).
Bibliography:
Dewaele, Jean-Marc. 1999. "Word order variation in French interrogative structures." International Journal of Applied Linguistics 125, no. 1: 161–180.
Dewaele, Jean-Marc. 2002. "Using sociostylistic variants in advanced French interlanguage: The case of nous/on." EUROSLA Yearbook 2: 205–226.
Etienne, Corinne and Kelly Sax. 2009. "Stylistic Variation in French: Bridging the Gap Between Research and Textbooks." The Modern Language Journal 93, no. 4: 584–606.
Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic patterns, No. 4. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Martineau, France, and Raymond Mougeon. 2003. "A Sociolinguistic Study of the Origins of ne Deletion in European and Quebec French." Language. 118.
Sax, Kelly. 2003. "Acquisition of stylistic variation in American learners of French." PhD dissertation, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN. Dissertation Abstracts International 65: 491.
