Synthèse rétrospective et nouvelles perspectives développementales

This chapter presents a synthesis of research on the acquisition of French as a second and foreign language undertaken at Stockholm University. It relates the earlier results of the project called InterFra (French interlanguage — development, interaction and variation) with more recent research on ultimate attainment in SLA. The study is presented in three parts. The first two are retrospective: first a description of the corpus InterFra (www.fraita.su.se/interfra) — the integral corpus is here introduced for the first time — then follow the results of the doctoral theses and the continuum of the developmental stages as proposed by Bartning and Schlyter (2004), which all build upon the InterFra corpus. The third part accounts for a recent research programme about the last stages in SLA, namely High-level proficiency in second language use, a common programme between four departments at Stockholm University. The chapter gives the latest results from studies in this programme using three learner groups near the native borderline, called ‘advanced’, ‘functional bilinguals’ and ‘near-natives’.