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English faux amis for francophones learning English By Ronald Sheen[Editor's Note: This article is partly based on Ronald Sheen's doctoral thesis on the error analysis of the English of Quebec francophone university students. He has kindly given his permission for its use on Volterre-Fr.] For the last forty years or so the world of EFL and ESL has been dominated by methods favouring an inductive approach to the acquisition of vocabulary. Thus, students, by means of contextual and situational clues, are assumed to arrive at meanings unconsciously or are encouraged to guess at meanings with teachers helping, often by means of Oscar-winning (but exhausting) performances. All of this is done to avoid as far as possible the students resorting to their L1 for meaning.
I consider the principle underlying this approach to be of dubious validity for it is impossible to prevent students equating what they experience in the L2 with their L1. This is particularly so with beginning and intermediate students with a limited number of class hours. However, with more advanced students their ability to engage in fluent communicative activities certainly results in substantial acquisition. I would suggest that it makes more sense to exploit the L1 in a variety of ways in order to help students learn vocabulary in an accurate and efficient manner. One area of vocabulary in which it is absolutely essential to use the L1 is in teaching students about faux amis (or false friends), henceforth FA. FA's are words in the target language which because of their similar forms to words in the L1, lead students to believe that they have the same meaning. Thus, a francophone student seeing the word "library" might falsely assume it has the same meaning as "librairie" and use it so, thus making an error for the former means "bibliothèque" and the latter means "book shop". This a very simple example but others involve so many complexities and difficulties that teachers need to devote considerable time and effort to their preparation for the teaching of such vocabulary. The following is intended to help teachers in this endeavour. It is specifically directed at teachers teaching English to francophones but the principles can easily be applied to other situations. First, I should point out that I feel that this area is best approached from a language awareness point of view. I take this position based on my assumption that teaching a language should have wider aims than simply encouraging students to communicate. I feel we should devote part of our teaching to acquainting students with the many fascinating aspects of language, particularly those involving differences between languages and those related to the ways in which languages increase their vocabularies including aspects of etymology. In doing this, I feel we will stimulate the interest of many students (but by no means all) and be instrumental in possibly creating future teachers and linguists. (However, one can certainly teach FA's without taking this aspect into consideration.) Therefore, as FA's derive from the process of borrowing, one should devote some time to explaining this process. In particular, one needs to bring out the fact that once a word is borrowed, it then takes on a life of its own and will almost certainly develop in a different manner to the word it came from, without changing unduly its form, thus creating a potential FA. In the specific context of francophones learning English, it is worth devoting time to the two situations which have resulted in the most borrowing. The first is the 300 or so years of Norman occupation of England from William the Conqueror's invasion in 1066, resulting in massive borrowing from French. The word "voyage" is an example here, the English word having a more restricted meaning than the French word. The second is the fact that both French and English borrowed the same words from both Latin and Greek but then the words developed differently in both languages. The words "pretend" and "prétendre" are examples thereof . Another is "agenda". The original Latin meaning was "things to be done". In English it has developed to mean those things to be done at a meeting whereas in French it has come to mean a diary recording things to be done. In the case of Quebec, it is also worth pointing out that more recent borrowing from English into Quebec French has caused more FA's to develop. An example is "smart". The borrowing has resulted in this becoming "smatt" in Quebec French. The meaning in English is "well dressed", "intelligent" and "impertinent" whereas the French meaning is "nice", "helpful". A further complication for FA's in Quebec French has been caused by French words as used in Quebec taking on the English meaning of their English counterparts. Thus, in Quebec, the word "éventuellement" has retained the original French meaning but for many Quebecers has also taken on the English meaning while at the same time retaining the original meaning. Classification of faux amis: FA's may be both grammatical and lexical, the latter being by far the most important. However, before getting down to the nitty gritty of lexical FA's, a point related to dictionary use needs to be made. As teachers, we are concerned with helping students to fully understand the meanings of FA's and to avoid their using them erroneously. This being so, we are concerned with the most important uses of these words and not the very infrequently used. There are cases where because of the historical link between FA's, both languages may have retained the original meaning which in one language is seldom if ever used. The word "tentative" in English is an example. In French it means "attempt" or "endeavour". In English, it means "hesitant" ot "cautious". However, the OED also gives for this word the same meanings as the French word which I have never seen used in normal English. I consider that such meanings should be ignored because of this. As teaching about FA's, necessarily entails dictionary use by students, teachers should be aware of this complication and explain this point particularly to the eager students who have gone burrowing into large dictionaries in the library and found some archaic meaning you are unaware of. Now to the nitty gritty. In presenting FA's to students, I have found Venn diagrams useful. As I cannot use them here as they involve drawing. I will use brief descriptions. In Venn diagrams, one uses a circle to represent the semantic field of each word. Lexical FA's may be of two types: absolute and partial. Absolutes: Absolute FA's are those in which the French and English words have no common meaning. The words "library" and "librairie", and "agenda" are examples. Using Venn diagrams, they are presented with two separate circles, there being no connection between the two because there is no common meaning. Other examples of absolutes are as follows:
Partials: A partial FA represents a situation in which the the L1 and L2 words have at least one common meaning and at least one different meaning. An example is the word "important". The French word refers to both quality and quantity. Thus one can say
a) C'est un homme important. b) Il a volé une somme importante. The English word only has the 'quality' meaning. The English word is therefore a FA for francophones as they will tend to say erroneously,, "He stole an important sum.". The Venn diagram in this situation will be a circle for the French word and a smaller one inside it to represent the English word. Thus the fact that the English word has a smaller semantic field than the French one is represented graphically. A useful generalisation is to be noted here. In such a Venn diagram, the word is a FA only for the speakers of the language represented by the larger circle. Thus "important" is only a FA for francophones but not for anglophones. On the other hand, if we take the pair "confortable/comfortable", the reverse situation applies.. The word "confortable" is a FA for anglophones but "comfortable" is not a FA for francophones. Anglophones will tend to say erroneously things such as "Etes-vous confortable?" instead of "Etes vous à votre aise?". Other such partial FA's are as follows:
The other type of partial FA is somewhat more complicated. Both words have at least one common meaning but each one has at least one meaning not shared by the other. The Venn diagram has the two circles intersecting. The intersection forms an elipse and represents the common meaning. The other two parts represent the separate meanings. An example is the word "circulation". The common meaning is used to refer to the circulation of air and blood. However, the French word also means "traffic" in English whereas the English word also means "tirage" in French, that is, the number of copies sold. This means that such words are FA's in both directions, that is for both francophones and anglophones. Other examples are:
Here now is a list of the most frequently encountered FA's by francophones some of which which may only be so for Quebecers. I have divided them into absolutes and partials but remind readers of the caution needed in classification because some have multiple meanings some of which are seldom used. This classification is based, therefore, on the usual meanings of the words and should in some cases be considered tentative open to modification. Absolutes:
Partials:
These two lists provide only a small proportion of FA's. There are tens of hundreds. The ones here should, however, enable students to create a good base to which they can add others which they should be encouraged to investigate. Grammatical faux amis: Grammatical faux amis are few in number but still worthy of note. There are three types: a) count/non-count b) different parts of speech c) syntactic. Count/non-count: These are words which have the same or similar form in both languages but may have the same lexical meaning. The difficulty is caused by the fact that they are count nouns in French but non-count in English. This causes francophones to tend to erroneously use the indefinite article with such words. They must avoid this and use instead phrases such as "a piece of ...". Examples are, "information", "research" and "toast". While dealing with such words, one might add the other count/non-count examples which are not FA's but do cause many errors. Examples are: "advice", "soap," "furniture", "fruit", "work", "weather", "lightning" and "thunder". Part of speech: There are very few examples of these. Three of them are as follows: "inconvenient" is an adjective in English but a noun in French although they have same meaning. The word "tentative" is noun in French but an adjective in English. However, as already indicated they have different meanings. The French adjective "intègre" also presents a potential problem. There is no equivalent adjective in English of similar form. Its equivalent may be expressed by using "integrity" as in "a man of integrity" or simply by the adjective, "honest". Syntactic: Syntactic FA's are often caused by verbs of similar form and meaning having different or no prepositions after them. An example is "operate". In French, "opérer" is transitive and therefore takes no preposition whereas the English verb takes the preposition "on". Other examples are as follows:
Pedagogical aspects: The teaching method implicit in this paper is deductive and analytical, a method I consider absolutely essential for this and most other vocabulary. However, although the initial teaching will involve straightforward explanation, teachers might like to combine it later with problem-solving techniques and bilingual and monolingual dictionary use. This entails the teacher giving the class a demonstration using dictionaries of how one can analyse an FA and arrive at an appropriate Venn diagram. with a conclusion as to where the word is an FA.. The teacher can then set the class individual or group problem solving tasks. Devoting class time to FA's is clearly chiefly applicable to homogeneous groups sharing a common L1. However, it is possible to use it with heterogeneous classes although the work will be individual in nature and carried out outside of class apart from the initial introduction of the principles etc. The intention is for students to prepare and keep up their own compilation of FA's caused by differences between their own L1's and English. As in all deductive teaching, the explanation and understanding is the first but essential step. It is, however, of little use unless the teacher creates activities in which students will have to use the FA's correctly and frequently. This necessity was brought home to me very forcefully many years ago. I had just given an introductory class on FA's discussing many of the examples mentioned in this paper, one of them being my emphasising that students should use "mark" or "grade" and avoid the FA, "note". After class, a particularly enthusiastic student came to me and said. "That was a great class, Sir. I'd never heard of faux amis before. I really learned a lot. Oh, by the way, can I have my note for the last assignment." - a humbling experience. The following books among numerous others, provide much additional information on FA's. Hill, R. (1982) A dictionary of false friends. MacMillan Press. London. Koessler, M.(1975) Les faux amis des vocabulaires anglais et américains. Vuibert, Paris. Vinay, J.P. & Darbelnet, J. (1971) Stylistique comparée du français et de l'anglais. Didier, Paris.
Ronald Sheen,
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