Bridging the Gap From Use to Grammar: A Semiotic-Based Instructional Material for Determiners in French as a Foreign Language at the University Level in Japan

This article introduces instructional material for a four-week study of the partitive article, the indefinite article, the definite article, and the demonstrative determiner in French as a Foreign Language at the university level in Japan, as well as its study design. First, the grammatical presentations of these determiners are analyzed in four widely distributed textbooks. It is shown that utterances are presented out of context and that translation favors the search for morphosyntactic rather than functional equivalence. Second, the instructional material and its study design are introduced. The phases of materialization and verbalization are borrowed from Concept-Based Language Instruction. The conception of the material is based on the triadic relationship of the sign in Peircean semiotics, the partial object corresponding to the semantic properties of the determiner, and the sign to the determiner. In the study, participants are asked to verbalize their understanding of the material and then to explain the use of the determiner in the context of a short video excerpt of a conversation where the determiner is used. They are expected to build up links between the generalization of the grammatical explanations and the use of the determiner in the context of the excerpt.