The Advanced Learner's Sociolinguistic Profile: On Issues of Individual Differences, Second Language Exposure Conditions, and Type of Sociolinguistic Variable

Situated within the recent new wave of second language acquisition studies investigating the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation, this article draws on a longitudinal database of advanced French interlanguage to explore a number of issues that have not yet been extensively investigated. They concern the issue of individual variation in the use of sociolinguistic variables, the issue of the relationship between the use of different sociolinguistic variables within the individual learner's sociolinguistic repertoire, and the issue of the long-term impact of naturalistic exposure on the instructed learner's sociolinguistic development. Quantitative results provide a close-up picture of the advanced learner's sociolinguistic profile, the detail of which calls into question a number of previously accepted findings, such as the traditional ideas that classroom learners make minimal use, if any, of informal sociolinguistic variants and that even with naturalistic exposure, they continue to underuse such variants relative to the native speaker. Our results demonstrate the value of focusing on the individual learner, as opposed to the traditional approach of providing group results. Our findings further underline the need to compare use of different variable types by the individual learner in order to illuminate how use of a specific variable relates to others.