Chapter 8. Variationist sociolinguistics, L2 sociopragmatic competence, and corpus analysis of classroom-based synchronous computer-mediated discourse

This chapter explores a number of issues related to analyzing second language (L2) sociopragmatic variation in a corpus of classroom-based synchronous computer-mediated discourse (SCMD) from a variationist sociolinguistic perspective. Building on our previous work in this area, we examine variation between the second-person pronouns tu and vous among US university learners of French at different instructional levels who engaged in a series of six small-group SCMD tasks.We have two main goals: (1) to explore whether, and to what extent, selected external (social) and internal (linguistic) factors influence learners’ use of tu and vous; and (2) to problematize the methodological and theoretical assumptions of the application of variationist sociolinguistics to L2 sociopragmatics and SCMD.