This paper demonstrates that French language maintenance in Ontario does not depend only on French language schooling. Other contributing factors include francophone concentration and institutional support for French in the public and private sector. Difficulties related to French language schooling and suggestions for improving the status of…

Currently accepted principles of communicative approaches to second language pedagogy are examined to determine the extent to which they are grounded in theories of language, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and other language-related disciplines. The discussion of communicative approaches distinguishes the notions of communicative competence…

An outline is provided of the contents and boundaries of three areas of competence, or systems of knowledge, that are to be minimally included in a theory of communicative competence: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence. Grammatical competence is concerned with the rules of sentence grammar and sentence…

A discussion of language data suggesting that young bilinguals and monolinguals exhibit a similar sequence of acquisition of standard use of English prepositions and French auxiliaries. Two error analysis studies are summarized, results of them are applied to the Franco-Ontarian and Quebec sociolinguistic contexts, and implications are discussed.…

A review of literature on communicative competence reveals many meanings of the concept and of the way it should be used in second and foreign language instruction. In the literature there are two views: that communicative competence includes grammatical competence, and that it does not; or at least the ability to communicate one's meaning is…

This study examines the use of the auxiliaries "avoir" and "etre" and of the prefix "re-" in the speech of Franco-Ontarian students. It is found that the tendency to use non-standard constructions such as "j'ai arrive en retard" and "je vais remettre la roue 'back'" has its origins in historical…

This study examines the hypothesis that the French used by a large number of Franco-Ontarians represents a linguistic system (or several systems) that differs from Standard French. In addition, a review of previous research leads to the inverse hypothesis, that Ontarian French represents a body of different systems or sub-systems that are more or…