Attitudes and language use of international students during their stay in Orléans

In the late 1960s, a group of British scholars came to Orléans to make speech recordings of the city's inhabitants, taking into account a wide range of speakers and communication situations. The aim was to study spoken French in its diversity and collecting authentic material as a basis for teaching French as a foreign language. In this way, and with the subsequent participation of French researchers, the corpus ESLO (Enquêtes SocioLinguistiques à Orléans) was created as a kind of "sound portrait" of the city by its inhabitants. Supplemented by a second series of recordings starting in 2008, it is now a veritable cultural-historical document and is considered one of the most important corpora for the linguistic study of spoken French. 
The project presented at this Le Studium Thursday builds on ESLO's methodology and focuses on a group of residents not yet included in the corpus. It deals with the group of international students and language learners who spend part of their studies in Orléans, become residents for a limited period of time, and enrich the "sound portrait” of the city through their way of speaking French as a foreign language. From a linguistic perspective, we are interested in how the use of French by these students develops during their stay abroad. Therefore, peer-to-peer interviews between French-speaking master's students and international students – analogous to the interviews held with young Orléans residents in the ESLO corpus – have been conducted, once shortly after their arrival in Orléans and a second time after the first six months of their stay. This presentation introduces the project and presents initial observations based on data collected during the research stay at the Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique and Le Studium Loire Valley Institute for Advanced Studies.

Speaker

Prof. Britta Thörle

LE STUDIUM / ATHENA Visiting Researcher  

FROM: University of Siegen - DE
IN RESIDENCE AT: Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique (LLL)  / University of Orléans, CNRS, University of Tours,  Bibliothèque Nationale de France - FR