In what ways are the Semarang University Indonesian learners of French developing an Interlanguage?

Abstract The ongoing doctoral research reported in this paper aims at defining the interlanguage developed by the students learning French at the Indonesian State University of Semarang (in the French Literature Section) through analysing a corpus made of examination papers written by these students during two consecutive academic years (2019–2021). The analyses conducted so far show a limited number of syntactic elements that are proving difficult to students. The main challenge these learners experience is the building of texts that can be read easily and are efficient at proving their point. The interlanguage characteristic of this particular population of learners points to a possible interference of the mother tongue, some informal patterns typical of spoken discourse, and a written production sometimes dependent on the course contents. This paper is part of the AILA Europe special issue.