The Written production in learner French (WIF) corpus: a new resource for examining children’s writing

This article accounts for research on Swedish children’s writing in French as a foreign language based on a corpus containing 105 children’s written retellings of a short picture story: Written production in learner French ( https://spraakbanken.gu.se/en/resources/franska-elevtexter ). The children (aged 11 15) attended grades 6 (n=17), 7 (n=26), 8 (n=35), and 9 (n=27) in the Swedish school system. Because French is always studied after English in Sweden, it is considered a third language. The main aim of the studies was to investigate the role of previously acquired languages (Swedish and English) by examining lexical cross-linguistic influence. In written story retellings, some items are necessary to render such that a potential reader will understand its content, therefore detailed analyses of word choices have the potential to reveal cross-linguistic influence and the degree of lexical precision and accuracy. Overall, the results show that both Swedish and English have an impact on learners’ word choices, with English as the most important source for cross-linguistic influence. Word choices have also been examined from a vocabulary depth perspective by analyzing formal and morphological aspects. The results suggest that word part knowledge starts to develop in the early school years, but that spelling remains difficult throughout the four years. The corpus lends itself to many types of investigations of French learner language, such as the study of verb morphology, word order, and gender assignment, to name but a few.