What are common challenges faced by learners of French at different ages

Learners of French face different challenges depending on their age group:

Children

• Young children acquire some French linguistic variation early but face challenges with rare variants like the negative morpheme “ne” which is infrequent in adult speech and thus harder to learn. ¹
• Reading difficulties are common among children, including decoding words, phrases, and texts, which affects reading fluency and comprehension. ^{2, 3}
• Dyslexia and developmental language disorders pose significant hurdles for some children learning French. ^{4, 5}
• Young learners may encounter difficulty with the French subjunctive mood, especially in recognizing when it is not required and mastering irregular verb conjugations. ⁶

Teenagers

• Teen learners experience issues related to writing and spelling competence, with common errors in orthography such as accents, apostrophes, capitalization, and conjugation. ^{7, 8}
• They also face challenges in gender assignment and agreement in French, a common difficult grammatical feature for learners at this stage, especially for those with multilingual backgrounds. ⁹

Adults

• Adult learners often struggle with applying complex French grammar rules like the subjunctive mood in context-sensitive ways rather than relying solely on rule-based approaches. ⁶
• Multilingual adults may have difficulties distinguishing speech differences from disorders when learning French, compounded by lack of appropriate assessment tools and training in some contexts. ¹⁰

Cross-Age Challenges

• Orthographic and grammatical errors (such as gender assignment, verb conjugations, and accents) are frequent across ages.
• Reading and comprehending French texts can be challenging at all ages due to linguistic complexity and orthographic depth. ^{3, 2}
• Motivation, parental and teacher involvement, and limited resources impact learners especially at younger ages. ^{11, 12}

In summary, children face foundational challenges in phonology, reading, and early grammar; teenagers struggle more with writing, orthography, and complex grammar; adults encounter difficulties mastering advanced grammatical distinctions and applying them communicatively. Each age group requires tailored pedagogical approaches to address these specific challenges effectively. ^{1, 2, 7, 9, 10, 6}

References

• Acquisition of a rare variant: ne-realization in the negative utterances of French children and their caregivers

• Difficulties of Reading in French Subject Among Morrocan Middle School Students: Case of Learners in First Year of the Secondary School

• The Overlap of Poor Reading Comprehension in English and French

• Multimodal intervention in 8- to 13-year-old French dyslexic readers: Study protocol for a randomized multicenter controlled crossover trial

• The Spelling Errors of French and English Children With Developmental Language Disorder at the End of Primary School

• Navigating Subjunctive Challenges and Pedagogical Strategies for Advanced French L2 Learners

• Analysis of French Orthographic Errors Among Students at a Vocational School in Yogyakarta

• Learners between Childhood and Adulthood: Assessing Writing Competences of Teens Learning French as a Foreign Language

• In chunks we trust … the problem of gender assignment in foreign language learning of French

• Assessing the speech production of multilingual children: A survey of speech-language therapists in French-speaking Belgium.

• Investigating Factors Contributing to the Reading Challenges among Intermediate Learners of San Rafael-Agpo Elementary School

• From Constraints to Control: The French Language Classroom in Multilingual Nigeria

• Characterising common challenges faced by parental caregivers of children with type 1 diabetes mellitus in mainland China: a qualitative study

• Investigation of the sero-epidemiology of vaccine preventable diseases and common viral infections in French populations using a multiplex serological assay

• Challenges in engaging EFL learners

• Prevalence and Antibiotic Susceptibility of the Common Bacterial Uropathogen Among UTI Patients in French Medical Institute for Children

• Bilingual oral language development among dual language immersion students: Use of a Bayesian approach with language learning progressions

• Language competences in lower secondary French-as-a-foreign language classrooms

• Teaching Literacy Skills to French Minimally Verbal School-Aged Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders with the Serious Game SEMA-TIC: An Exploratory Study

• Simultaneous bilingual language acquisition: The role of parental input on receptive vocabulary development

• Learning to Read in Multiple Languages: A Study Exploring Allophone Students’ Reading Development in French Immersion

• Online synchronous communication in the second-language classroom

• The Overlap of Poor Reading Comprehension in English and French

• Overcoming the Problem of Learning Foreign Language Skills in the Classroom

• Instructional Supports for Students with Special Education Needs in French as a Second Language Education: A Review of Canadian Empirical Literature

• Multilingual education in early years in Luxembourg: a paradigm shift?