Explicit Instruction of the gender of nouns in French: experiments in elementary to immersion classes

This article describes a study done in Grade 2 French immersion classes consisting in experimenting with the explicit teaching of regularities observed in French noun endings that are indicative of the noun's grammatical gender (for example, the French phoneme [o] that predicts masculine gender for 93 % of the nouns ending with it.) Results from the pre-test, post-test and delayed post-test indicate that a short treatment including the explicit teaching of four reliable endings (with rule enunciation) lead learners to be significantly more accurate in assigning the correct genders to known nouns and even unknown (rare) ones. The results tend to show that this type of explicit teaching can be effective with learners that young, which in turn could help diminish the fossilization of gender errors that are frequent in older and more advanced learners' productions, that are resistant to correction and that produce numerous agreement errors.