Abstract EN:

Based on the analysis of the acquisition of French in Argentina, more specifically in Tucuman, this research presents a longitudinal study of the acquisition process of a foreign language in a school setting, with the purpose of describing what the learners acquire along an extended period of systematic language input. The starting point is the empirical perception of a great distance between the linguistic models available during the teaching/learning process and the linguistic competence actually developed by a learner. The hypothesis underlying this work is that the characteristics of the acquisition of French in school contexts, where this language is definitely an object of study rather than a means of communication, involve specific acquisition itineraries which match to a great extent those observed in a social setting. The study is focuses on the acquisition of temporality in French by Spanish-speaking children and adolescents. The corpus is composed of narratives produced by five learners in three different school levels, two of whom (9 to 11 year-olds) were observed during three years and three of whom (12 to 17 year-olds) during six years. From a language acquisition perspective, this study attempts to make a contribution to the general view of the process of foreign language development in a school setting, as well as to propose a positive critical review of the learner, based on the observation of language development under special language input conditions.