Morphosyntactic Deviations in Written French among Multilingual University Learners at the Nigeria French Language Village

This study examined morphosyntactic deviation patterns in the written French of 300-level students during their immersion programme at the Nigeria French Language Village (NFLV), Badagry. Although previous research has documented selected deviation types among Nigerian learners of French, the literature reviewed did not reveal a study combining a written corpus of NFLV learners with an integrated morphosyntactic classification across four domains. The study analysed 160 timed compositions produced by 80 undergraduates from diverse Nigerian linguistic backgrounds. Drawing on Corder’s Error Analysis, Selinker’s Interlanguage Theory, and Odlin’s Cross-Linguistic Influence framework, the study identified and classified deviations involving noun phrase agreement, prepositional and verbal rection, verb morphology and tense–aspect, and syntactic structure. The corpus yielded 542 coded deviation tokens. Noun phrase agreement constituted the largest category (31.0%), followed by prepositional and verbal rection (26.0%), verb morphology and tense–aspect (23.1%), and syntactic structure (19.9%). Several patterns were compatible with English or indigenous-language influence, while others were consistent with French overgeneralisation. These interpretations were treated cautiously because the corpus could not establish individual-level causation. The study recommends four interventions: explicit Focus-on-Form instruction, contrastive consciousness-raising, structured post-editing, and continuous diagnostic assessment. It concludes that immersion programmes require systematic grammatical support to help multilingual learners develop both communicative fluency and structural accuracy in written French.