This presentation examines the strategies used by adult Jamaican learners of French in a guided environment, to express negative construals in their automatic oral expression. The study is based on data from a longitudinal corpus of oral productions by learners, recorded during individual interviews over a nineteen-month period at the University of the West Indies. It pays special attention to the effects of the diglossic situation on the learners' foreign language acquisition.

I identify difficulties, which persist at advanced levels of proficiency, exemplified in more or less felicitous avoidance strategies, used to replace other negations with the marker of total negation. I hypothesize that these strategies, especially with negative adverbials, are possibly caused by transfer influence from the Jamaican Creole that relies on the interaction of negation with various adverbs of temporal perspective to express English equivalents of never, not anymore, etc.

Zobl (1982) establishes the link between language transfer and natural developmental processes as interacting processes rather than opposing ones. Transfer cannot change the route of acquisition. However, it has the potential of bringing about a delay or a plateau, if there is a developmental stage in the acquisition of L2 that corresponds to a pattern in the learner's L1, and, this can ultimately lead to permanent fossilization of erroneous patterns (cf. articles in Gass and Selinker 1992).

Once a 'problem' is identified, thanks to the interlanguage corpus, the practitioners can decide what pedagogical action should be taken to rectify it. I suggest how more appropriate avoidance strategies and specific communicative activities could help prevent long term fossilization.

References :

Gass, S. and L. Selinker (eds.). 1992. Language transfer in language learning. Amsterdam/Philadelphia : Benjamins.

Zobl, H. 1982. A direction for contrastive analysis : the comparative study of developmental sequences. TESOL Quaterly 16(2) : 169-183.