ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the acquisition trajectory of Polish adult learners of second language (L2) French at two levels of proficiency through the interaction of sentence and communicative rules in the process of making reference to entities in a film-retelling task. It shows how these learners use the linguistic strategies available in the L2 to ensure discourse cohesion in their oral narratives. Based on Ariel’s Accessibility Theory, the chapter focuses on the way the learners employ high, mid, and low accessibility markers to maintain and shift reference to the protagonists of the story. It presents from the functionalist point of view, what is the learner’s verbal task, and how complex is the choice of an appropriate determiner or other linguistic means to refer to entities in French. The chapter shows how L2 French learners manage to construct a cohesive discourse and the features specific to their interlanguage, from the beginner to the advanced levels of proficiency.
