Research projects

I am currently involved in a variety of research projects. They are: a) Research on Variation in Acadian French; b) Research on Variation in immersion French; c) Pomme, an interactive website for the learning of standard French; d) Le Patron (an online L2 French grammar checker); and e) Research on Real-time Change in Minority Language Communities.

The Acadian project is jointly undertaken with Ruth King from York University. It centres on grammatical variation in Acadian French as spoken in Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island. A number of the papers are listed in the above link to publications and papers. The project is particularly interested in variation between traditional Acadian variants and variants used in standard and Québécois French.

The immersion project, co-directed with Raymond Mougeon, is described here. The Acadian project with Ruth King is described here. As for Pomme, lead by Martin Beaudoin, well you can go and check it out for yourself by clicking here. Pomme is an interactive website for the teaching and learning of French grammar. It is extensive, exhausitive, impressive ... do yourself a favor and check it out. Then there's the Le Patron , which I've been working on for eight years now (with my colleague Stéfan Sinclair, now at McMaster University). The purpose of the Le Patron is to allow students to upload compositions in French and receive feedback on common errors. If you are a teacher of French and there are reoccuring errors which you would like to see addressed, please by all means send them to me and I will implement them. Finally, the project on real-time change is co-directed with Raymond Mougeon and aims to gather a contemporary Franco-ontarian corpus. Once established, this corpus will allow us to conduct compartive research with Mougeon and Beniak's previous corpus.