{"id":21,"date":"2026-05-20T16:10:47","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T14:10:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.univ-tlse2.fr\/sofra-class\/?page_id=21"},"modified":"2026-06-10T13:37:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T11:37:15","slug":"corpus-sofra","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.univ-tlse2.fr\/sofra-class\/corpus-sofra\/","title":{"rendered":"Corpus SOFRA"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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Project SOFRA was created at a point in time where more and more Arabic-speaking Syrian adults are forced to leave their country and seek asylum in Europe. These adults are faced with the urgent need to learn and master the French language in a brief period in order to access education, employment, and accommodation. This profile of learner has long been neglected in language acquisition research, especially Second-Language Acquisition (SLA), even though it is becoming increasingly prevalent in the French university environment (Sourisseau, 2018). Indeed, in the 70s and 80s this \u00ab disadvantaged \u00bb migrant population (Young-Scholten, 2013) captured the interest of researchers, leading to groundbreaking results concerning acquisitional trajectories, interlanguage,
and learner-specific varieties. (Bartning & Schlyter, 2004; Bhardwaj et al., 1988; Klein et al., 1993; Noyau, 1990), including seminal works like the Ecology of adult language acquisition (EALA) led by the European Science Foundation (Perdue, 1993b, 1993a; V\u00e9ronique, 2021). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in the last decades, SLA research has turned largely to middle-class learners, many works tapping into the readily available number of exchange students (ERASMUS and otherwise) as a source of participants (Young-Scholten, 2013). This change in population of interest is accompanied by a change in research outcomes and objectives, and focus has shifted over to the cognitive aspects of language and the internal processes underlying learning. This often implies a commensurate disregard for the contextual factors that affect language acquisition (Firth & Wagner, 1997; Hulstijn et al., 2014).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Informed by socio-cultural theories of learning (Vygotsky, 1986) and predicated upon the need to re-integrate contextual and socio-cultural factors in language acquisition research (Firth & Wagner, 1997; Norton, 2000, 2013), project SOFRA investigates how Syrian asylum seekers learning French in France interface with French as a new national language. SOFRA focuses on the role of socio- and psycho-cultural factors in second language acquisition in general, and on the psychological instability and need for adaptation in a new country and a new culture in particular.
More narrowly, it aims to investigate the acquisition of French as a second language in this population through their socialization process in the culture of the target language from longitudinal data collected over 10 months. The longitudinal design of the study allows for concurrent examination of participants\u2019 language acquisition trajectory with their transitory psychological states, their strategies for co-construction and identity-forming, as well as their perception of the novel language and culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The research questions underlying this project are the following:<\/mark><\/p>\n\n\n\n