Collaborative dialogues in the zone of proximal development, grade eight French immersion students learning the conditional tense

grantor: University of TorontoThis research investigates how focusing on the linguistic form and meaning of the French conditional during collaborative dialogues (CDs) improves the accuracy of learners' second language. A sociocultural framework, based on the work of Vygotsky (1978), is used to observe the development of second language learning (SLL) of four dyads in a grade 8 French immersion classroom. The research questions follow: (1) Do students within their respective ZPDs demonstrate internalization (self-regulation) of the French conditional following intervention to address its use in hypothetical contexts? (2) What linguistic knowledge do peers co-construct during CDs (other-regulation) related to the conditional? (3) During other-regulation do peers co-construct accurate linguistic knowledge related to the conditional? This descriptive classroom-based study involves a pretest, posttest, delayed-posttest design, with two samples of eight students, one in a study group and one in a comparison group. The dialogues of four dyads were transcribed during the course of a 4-week teaching unit. Evidence of the product and process of learning is sought through various tests and peer dialogues. The study group outperformed the comparison group on all five measures of the original teaching unit's tests (Day, Collins, Rioux, & 1989) at posttesting. In addition, tailor-made test items based on each dyad's dialogues were designed. A feature of the study was to match up identical conditionals from these tests with pretest items from the unit's tests. The study group showed progress from pretesting to posttesting and maintained high scores during delayed-posttesting on these identical conditionals. The peer talk was analyzed in two ways. First, the content was analyzed in relation to conditional-related episodes (CREs). The linguistic information the peers provided to each other in 345 CREs was divided into three categories: formal features (39%), tense selection (39%) and lexical meaning (23%). Second, there was an in-depth qualitative examination of two CRXs (including one or more CREs). The dialogues and tests of two learners were analyzed using the five levels of transition in the ZPD (Aljaafreh & Lantolf, 1994) and in relation to Swain's output hypothesis (1985; 1997) to describe the learning of the conditional. The interactional data combined with the test data provide evidence suggesting that these learners can and do resolve linguistic problems by jointly constructing linguistic knowledge during their CDs and applying this knowledge in subsequent SL use.Ph.D