UC Berkeley

Resulting from France’s centuries-long colonial project across several continents, French is estimated to be the fifth most widely spoken language globally. Yet, despite its presence across continents and despite the linguistic diversity within France itself, notions of ‘good’ and ‘correct’ French continue to be associated with the image of the white, upper-class, metropolitan Français de souche. As a result, second-language French instruction often adopts and perpetuates this monolithic image of Frenchness and Francophonie, peripheralizing the richly diverse range of communities that use French in social life. This underrepresentation of global Frenches not only harms the development of sociolinguistic competence but may also have negative effects on language students’ sense of belonging. Drawing methodologically from applied linguists working in the Spanish language context, I adapt approaches to representing sociolinguistic variation in language teaching to the French context to address the sociolinguistic lacunae common in United States, university-level elementary French courses. This dissertation describes the development, implementation, and assessment of a series of lessons that foreground language variation in the Francophone context, integrated into UC Berkeley’s existing Elementary French curriculum. The learning outcomes observed in this implementation differ from those of previous studies in the Spanish context, notably with respect to students’ sociolinguistic knowledge and language attitudes. While quantitative findings suggest that UC Berkeley students enter the French language sequence with existing sociolinguistic awareness and relatively accepting language attitudes, we observe improvement in their ability to produce non-standard forms after receiving the curricular intervention. Furthermore, contrary to prior assumptions, we observe that exposure to sociolinguistic variation in French does not undermine learners’ proficiency in the prescriptive, pedagogical standard, but instead may even facilitate their acquisition of the so-called ‘standard’. Additionally, qualitative findings suggest that there is a clear, present interest among students in seeing more of the wider Francophone world represented in their learning experience. As such, I argue that our conversations as applied linguists need to move beyond debating whether sociolinguistic variation should be taught more explicitly in French language courses, toward how we can best do so for the benefit of our students.