Betsy Kerr
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Department of French and Italian |
Statement of Interests
As a linguist and a language teacher, most of my research has consisted of corpus-based studies of various aspects of informal spoken French, notably the pragmatic correlates of certain syntactic constructions and the functions of various discourse connectors. I have also studied the occurrence of similar features in oral narratives of learners of French. I am a co-author of the first-year college textbook, Deux Mondes, a "Natural Approach" text. I teach courses in French language and linguistics, including Advanced/Pedagogical Grammar of French, Oral Discourse of French, History of French, and Sociolinguistics of French. A current interest is the use of concordancing for advanced language learning and teaching. For more information, see Concordancing and Language Learning and Bibliography and Useful Links for Data-Driven Learning.
Publications
Books
Deux Mondes: A Communicative Approach (with Tracy Terrell et al.), 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th eds. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993, 1997, 2002, 2004).
The Pragmatics of Left Detachment in Spoken Standard French (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1985).
Articles
"Variant word-order constructions: To teach or not to teach? Evidence from learner narratives," in Pedagogical Norms for Second and Foreign Language Learning and Teaching, S. Gass et al, eds. (Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2002), 183-198.
"The Acquisition of Connectors in French L2 Narrative Discourse," Journal of French Language Studies, 8 (1998), 189-208.
"Discourse Particles in French Conversation: (eh) ben, bon, and enfin," French Review, 68:5 (1995), 813-21.
"Apports de l'analyse du discours à l'enseignement de la langue," French Review, 64:1 (1990): 95-107.
"A Functional Explanation of French Nonlexical Datives," Studies in Language, 9:2 (1985): 159-95.
"The Notion of 'Dative' in Linguistic Theory and Grammar of French," Lingvisticae Investigationes, 1:2 (1980): 245-92.