This is an introduction to the findings in my thesis "translinguistic influence in Malaysian when learning French". It shows what is to be expected of malaysian learners of French when they interact in the target language, knowing that these learners know Malay, Mandarin and English. My question was, how are the learning of tenses in French apprehended by these multicultural / lingual learners ?

1. PHD
Sorbonne Paris Cité
Accomplished at Paris Diderot University
PHD School n’°132
Formal linguistics department - UMR 7110 CNRS
Translinguistic influence in Malaysia when learning
French
by Justine Esteve
Phd in Linguistics
directed by Claire Saillard
Presented and defended publicly at the Paris Diderot university on 12/1/2017
Delahaie, Juliette / Lecturer / Université de Lille
Ledegen, Gudrun/ Lecturer / Université Rennes 2
Saillard, Claire / Lecturer / Université Paris Diderot (Phd supervisor)
Fon Sing Guillaume / Université Paris Diderot

2. The context : Penang, Malaysia

3. Languages and linguistic
communities
Statistics to be found respectively in SERI, 2011, p. 5 and in Buku Maklamut Perangkaan, 2013, p. 4.

4. School population
What does learning another language means
for you ? (multiple choice question)
Mother
tongue*
Second
languages*
English
Mandarin
Malay
Hokkien
English
Mandarin
Cantonese
Hokkien
Malay
*Date introduced by order of importance – unique answers that would correspond
to only one learner have been set aside.

5. The corpus
• 1 questionnaire – 174 answers
• Two corpora – 7 hours of recording (for 21 learners)

6. The method
A bilingual manual adapted to the
IGCSE and to the school pedagogy
(medium of teaching has to be
English).
Tenses :
- A « textual » approach (central
events and background
descriptions correspond
respectively to passé composé
and to imparfait).
- The notion of accomplished and
non-accomplished events.
- Apparition order of tenses :
présent, passé composé,
imparfait.

7. Languages in this study
English
• Conjugaison
plays a major
part in
expressing
tense and
aspect.
French
•Conjugaison
plays a major
part in
expressing
tense and
aspect.
Malaysian
English
•Conjugaison,
affixes,
adverbs and
context mark
aspect and
tense
according to
the used lectal
continuum.
Malay
•Tense and
aspectual
marking are
expressed
through
affixes,
adverbs and
discursive
tense
indications.
Mandarin
•Aspectual
marking is
grammatical,
tense marking
is lexical
(adverb and
tense
indications).

8. Key question : teaching a second
language in a plurilingual environment
L1
L2 / L3
Target
language
Path of
acquisition
“ Transfer is the
influence resulting
from the similarities
and differences
between the target
language and any other
language that has been
previously (and
perhaps imperfectly)
acquired ”
Odlin, 1989, p. 27
Interlanguage

9. Use of tenses in the corpus’
interactions
Malaysian learners English learners
Use of tenses in both corpora (correct and non-correct forms).
- Present tense is the tense use the most, followed by the passé composé (according to the tense
presentation in the manual).
- Non-identifiable forms are an important part in the Malaysian corpus.

10. Lexical aspect / Grammatical aspect
Malaysian learners English Learners
Lexical aspect of the verbs used in both corpora according to verbal tenses (correct and non-correct
tenses).
« It has been consistently observed that L1 and L2 learners, in the early stages of acquiring verbal
morphology, use tense-aspect markers selectively according to the inherent lexical aspect of the verb
to which the tense-aspect marker is attached or with which it is associated » (Andersen et Shirai,
1996, p. 529).

11. Verbs forms in « e » / neutral forms
Non-identifiable forms in the corpora (15% of the Malaysian corpus and 4% of the English corpus).

12. Thank you for your attention