The Liberal Way of War? French representations of the Allies, 1944-2008

This chapter looks at the ways in which Anglo-American participants in the Liberation of France have been represented in French narratives in the decades since the Second World War, through the developing French historiography of Allied participation in the War, and through the various roles assigned to the Allies in key postwar memorialisation ceremonies in France.

The politics of temporary work deregulation in Europe: solving the French puzzle

Temporary work has expanded in the last three decades with adverse implications for inequalities. Because temporary workers are a constituency that is unlikely to impose political costs, governments often choose to reduce temporary work regulations. While most European countries have indeed implemented such reforms, France went in the opposite direction, despite having both rigid labour markets and high unemployment. My argument to solve this puzzle is that where replaceability is high, workers in permanent and temporary contracts have overlapping interests, and governments choose to regulate temporary work to protect permanent workers. In turn, replaceability is higher where permanent workers’ skills are general and wage coordination is low. Logistic regression analysis of the determinants of replaceability — and how this affects governments’ reforms of temporary work regulations — supports my argument. Process tracing of French reforms also confirm that the left has tightened temporary work regulations to compensate for the high replaceability.

The 'child of Babylon' and the problem of paternity in Medieval French Alexander romances

A study of the use of hybrid physical appearance both to signal and to explore the disputed paternity of Alexander the Great throughout its vernacular French tradition. The article compares the 'child of Babylon' portent and Alexander's son Alior in the twelfth-century French "Roman d'Alexandre" poem cycle, and a fifteenth-century prose adaptation of it.

The role of context in forming young learners' attitudes and motivation to learning French

Despite the wealth of valuable information that has been generated by motivation studies to date, there are certain limitations in the common approaches. Quantitative and psychometric approaches to motivation research that have dominated in recent decades provided epiphenomenal descriptions of learner motivation within different contexts. However, these approaches assume homogeneity within a given group and often mask the variation between learners within the same, and different, contexts. Although these studies have provided empirical data to form and validate theoretical constructs, they have failed to recognise learners as individual ‘people’ that interact with their context. Learning context has become increasingly explicit in motivation studies, (see Coleman et al. 2007 and Housen et al. 2011), however it is generally considered as a background variable which is pre-existing and external to the individual. Stemming from the recent ‘social turn’ (Block 2003) in SLA research from a more cognitive-linguistic perspective to a more context-specific view of language learning, there has been an upsurge in demand for a greater focus on the ‘person in context’ in motivation research (Ushioda 2011). This paper reports on the findings of a longitudinal study of young English learners of French as they transition from primary to secondary school. Over 12 months, the study employed a mixed-method approach in order to gain an in-depth understanding of how the learners’ context influenced attitudes to language learning. The questionnaire results show that whilst the learners displayed some consistent and stable motivational traits over the 12 months, there were significant differences for learners within different contexts in terms of their attitudes to the language classroom and their levels of self-confidence. A subsequent examination of the qualitative focus group data provided an insight into how and why these attitudes were formed and emphasised the dynamic and complex interplay between learners and their context.

A Double-threshold GARCH Model for the French Franc/Deutschmark exchange rate

This paper combines and generalizes a number of recent time series models of daily exchange rate series by using a SETAR model which also allows the variance equation of a GARCH specification for the error terms to be drawn from more than one regime. An application of the model to the French Franc/Deutschmark exchange rate demonstrates that out-of-sample forecasts for the exchange rate volatility are also improved when the restriction that the data it is drawn from a single regime is removed. This result highlights the importance of considering both types of regime shift (i.e. thresholds in variance as well as in mean) when analysing financial time series.

Writing in French in secondary schools in England and Germany: are the British really 'bad language learners’?

It is widely assumed that the British are poorer modern foreign language (MFL) learners than their fellow Europeans. Motivation has often been seen as the main cause of this perceived disparity in language learning success. However, there have also been suggestions that curricular and pedagogical factors may play a part. This article reports a research project investigating how German and English 14- to 16-year-old learners of French as a first foreign language compare to one another in their vocabulary knowledge and in the lexical diversity, accuracy and syntactic complexity of their writing. Students from comparable schools in Germany and England were set two writing tasks which were marked by three French native speakers using standardised criteria aligned to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEF). Receptive vocabulary size and lexical diversity were established by the X_lex test and a verb types measure respectively. Syntactic complexity and formal accuracy were respectively assessed using the mean length of T-units (MLTU) and words/error metrics. Students' and teachers' questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were used to provide information and participants' views on classroom practices, while typical textbooks and feedback samples were analysed to establish differences in materials-related input and feedback in the two countries. The German groups were found to be superior in vocabulary size, and in the accuracy, lexical diversity and overall quality – but not the syntactic complexity – of their writing. The differences in performance outcomes are analysed and discussed with regard to variables related to the educational contexts (e.g. curriculum design and methodology).

Missionary children: The French Holy Childhood Association in European context, 1843-c.1914

In the mid-nineteenth century, thousands of children in Europe and beyond were organized into battalions of fundraisers for overseas missions. By the end of the century these juvenile missionary organizations had become a global movement, generating millions of pounds in revenue each year. While the transnational nature of the children’s missions and publications has been well-documented by historians, the focus has tended to be on the connections that were established by encounters between the young western donors, missionaries overseas and the non-western ‘other’ constructed by their work. A full exploration of the European political, social and cultural concerns that produced the juvenile missionaries movement and the trans-European networks that sustained it are currently missing from historical accounts of the phenomenon. This article looks at the largest of these organizations, the Catholic mission for children, the French Holy Childhood Association (L’Œuvre de la sainte enfance), to understand how the principles this mission sought to impose abroad were above all an expression of anxieties at home about the role of religion in the family, childhood and in civil society as western polities were modernizing and secularizing in the nineteenth century.

Once upon a time, there was a fabulous funambulist: What children learn about the “high-level” vocabulary they encounter while listening to stories

Previous research has shown that listening to stories supports vocabulary growth in preschool and school-aged children and that lexical entries for even very difficult or rare words can be established if these are defined when they are first introduced. However, little is known about the nature of the lexical representations children form for the words they encounter while listening to stories, or whether these are sufficiently robust to support the child’s own use of such ‘high-level’ vocabulary. This study explored these questions by administering multiple assessments of children’s knowledge about a set of newly-acquired vocabulary. Four- and 6-year-old children were introduced to nine difficult new words (including nouns, verbs and adjectives) through three exposures to a story read by their class teacher. The story included a definition of each new word at its first encounter. Learning of the target vocabulary was assessed by means of two tests of semantic understanding – a forced choice picture-selection task and a definition production task – and a grammaticality judgment task, which asked children to choose between a syntactically-appropriate and syntactically-inappropriate usage of the word. Children in both age groups selected the correct pictorial representation and provided an appropriate definition for the target words in all three word classes significantly more often than they did for a matched set of non-exposed control words. However, only the older group was able to identify the syntactically-appropriate sentence frames in the grammaticality judgment task. Further analyses elucidate some of the components of the lexical representations children lay down when they hear difficult new vocabulary in stories and how different tests of word knowledge might overlap in their assessment of these components.

The Devil’s Daughters and a question of translation between Occitan and Anglo-Norman French: ‘De las .vii. filhas del diable’ (British Library Add. MS 17920).

The evidence for vernacular-to-vernacular translation is hard to demonstrate in medieval Romance languages. This article analyses a hypothesis published a century ago that there is an identifiable Anglo-Norman source for an Occitan prose text. Both texts spring from a Latin exemplum in which the seven capital vices are personified as the Devil's daughters, married off to seven social categories (the clergy, knights, peasants, etc.). Although the hypothesis is disproved, it remains that the dialogue between Anglo-Norman French and Occitan has been overlooked, and deserves further exploration.