Department of French and Italian

Applied Linguistics is the field of study that seeks to apply findings from core areas of linguistics to real-world issues. Our focus will be the application of selected topics in linguistics to the pedagogy of French as a foreign language in the United States. Inter alia, we will draw on a sociolinguistically oriented survey of the linguistic situation in various Francophone regions of the world, exploring aspects of variability in French, including social, stylistic, and geographical variation, and implications of such variability for the FLE (français langue étrangère) classroom. Our examination of French as found in multiple settings will include: the selection and development of standard norms and pedagogical norms; an exploration of what it means to be a native speaker, and why the construct has been problematized in the applied linguistic literature; the light that immersion programs can shed on learning a foreign language in a classroom setting; and issues of language policy in France and the Francophone world.