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This study is an investigation of the extent to which francophone learners of English as a second language (ESL) are aware of the differences between French and English question formation and how such awareness relates to their L2 performance. Three tasks were administered to 58 grades 5 and 6 francophone ESL learners. In a grammaticality judgement task, learners were asked to judge the grammaticality of English Wh– and yes/no questions. In a scrambled questions task, participants were instructed to create questions with sets of words written on individual cards. Some of the participants were also interviewed. Students’ own grammaticality judgement and scrambled questions tasks were used as stimuli for the interviews. On the grammaticality judgement task, questions in which the subject was a pronoun were judged more accurately than questions in which the subject was a noun. The most frequent non-target question forms that learners produced on the scrambled questions task were those in which a word (e.g. auxiliary do) was ‘fronted’ (placed at the beginning of a declarative sentence). The interview indicated that most students had a poor understanding of differences between English and French questions. Correlation analyses showed a positive relationship between students’ awareness of L1–L2 differences and their ability to correctly judge and form questions in English.
