Marcadores del discurso en francés lengua extranjera: Por qué y para qué

This paper examines the challenges posed by discourse markers (DM) for learners at secondary school level of French as a foreign language (FFL), based on a corpus of samples of written work by FFL students. The first section looks at how DM are presented and described in the textbooks and dictionaries used by secondary school teachers and learners. The next section focuses on organizational discourse markers, with an analysis of student errors in the corpus. The range of semantic possibilities explored in the case of enfin and finalement offers a good illustration of the difficulties faced by teachers and learners alike in the acquisition of DM, due to the multifunctionality of the particles and their formal similarity to the Spanish DM en fin and finalmente. The final section makes some observations regarding the effectiveness of teaching DM systematically from the earliest stages of FFL learning, based on recent work by Donis Perez (2014).