The case of liaison after different forms of the verbs etre and avoir in Austrian learner French

This article examines the behaviour of liaison after different forms of etre and avoir in the recordings of 145 Austrian high school students from years 3 to 8 (ages 12 to 18) learning French as an additional foreign language within the Pro(2)F project. The study is based on 979 contexts of potential liaison in a reading task and in spontaneous speech and on the possible oral input of the students: the audio material of their textbook (206 contexts of potential liaison) as well as recordings of 12 Austrian French teachers (37 contexts of potential liaison). The data suggest that liaisons in the student corpora result partly from the reproduction of memorized multiword sequences and partly from a productive phonological process. We have to bear in mind that the situation is different from L1 acquisition: By comparison oral input is under-represented, and goes hand in hand with orthographic input and explicit instruction right at the beginning of the acquisition. These factors affect the acquisition of liaison considerably. We therefore recommend a didactic approach that takes into account explicit instruction as well as grapheme-phoneme correspondences and a maximum of authentic oral input (of native speakers).