Loading...
Please wait, while we are loading the content...
Similar Documents
De de à ça : enseigner la grammaire française aux finnophones
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Kalmbach, Jean-Michel |
| Copyright Year | 2005 |
| Abstract | Kalmbach, Jean-Michel From de to ca : How to teach French grammar to Finnish-speaking learners Jyvaskyla : University of Jyvaskyla, 2004, 214 p. ISBN 952-91-8561-8 (nid.) 951-39-2116-6 (PDF) The present study focuses on the way French grammar is presented in Finnish school books, especially in grammar books but also in text or exercise books. Some Internet sites have also been studied. Although French has been and still is a fairly widely studied foreign language in Finnish schools and in higher education, the level of teaching books has not undergone any real changes for many decades. All recent grammar books as well as the grammatical content of text or exercise books can be traced back to one older grammar, which is still in use and contains many non existent or clearly wrong grammar rules, the newer ones thus perpetuating the same old mistakes. The morphology of the French article is rather complicated, but it can be thoroughly explained by means of clear and simple rules that virtually leave no place for interpretation. In the material that was studied, this was certainly not the case, as many important mechanisms seem not to have been identified by the authors. One of these is the famous “cacophony rule”, which explains why an article form beginning with a d disappears after the preposition de. This simple rule does not exist in the Finnish school literature. Many problems are also due to the misleading application of Finnish aspectual categories, such as partitive object vs. total object, to French, where these simply do not exist. We show in this study that not only does the Finnish partitiivi not correspond to a hypothetical French “partitive”, but that there is not even such a thing in French as “partitive article”. The erroneous interpretation of grammatical structures in the case of article causes very serious problems in the field of pronominalization, as the form of the pronoun replacing the noun phrase may depend on the form of the article. A special emphasis is laid on pronominalization. For Finnish learners the greatest difficulty lies in what can be called the “il/ca dichotomy”. Whereas Finnish generally uses one single pronoun (se) to refer to noun phrases or any kind of antecedents, French normally uses il to replace a noun phrase and ca in all other cases. Furthermore the pronoun il can have various forms, depending e.g. on referential category, and pronominalization is achieved by means of a mixture of classical personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns and even adverbs or prepositions (zero anaphor). These build a very complex and heterogeneous system which is undoubtedly difficult for learners to understand and to handle. This system is not explained in the proper way in the grammars or other learning material we have studied. French grammars and other French school books produced in Finland need to be thoroughly reviewed and modernized. There is an urgent need to remove erroneous rules and also to introduce into the terminology basic concepts such as determiner or infinitive markers (which exist not only in English but also in French). The terminology also needs to be more consistent and clearer and rules must be presented as real rules learners can implement in everyday language performance and not as catalogues of cases based on alleged semantical criteria. The future of French learners and of French learning in Finland is at stake. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://jyx.jyu.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/18897/9513921166.pdf;sequence=1 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
