The objective of this chapter is to describe and compare the interlanguage development of two learners during the first 8 hours of instructed L2 acquisition in an unknown language (Polish). The two learners in question, Gilles and Luc, had nearly identical linguistic profiles (French L1, English L2), were of the same gender (male) and age (26 and 27), and received identical Polish language input. We analysed the performance of Gilles and Luc at different 'periods' of TL exposition with respect to the input processing activities of speech perception, speech comprehension and grammatical analysis. Each 'period' coincides with the number of hours of Polish input the learners were exposed to (e.g. 'Period 1h30' refers to the point in time when the learners had been exposed to a total of one hour and thirty minutes of Polish input). As we are interested in L1 (French) influence on the learners' performance, we have glossed the Polish sentences in French, followed by an English gloss. The same is true with all results presented in this book. This allowed us to maintain a natural means of observation, that of the acquisition of Polish through the eyes and ears of the French speaker-reader-hearer. As mentioned earlier, the learners of our study kept journals during the observation period. We will use remarks from these journals when pertinent. Quotations will be translated into English from the original French versions.

The organisation of this chapter is as follows. We begin with a detailed description of Gilles' data collected from tests at distinct periods between 1h30 and 8h00, followed by Luc's data collected during the same time periods. Our discussion of Luc's data includes comparisons with Gilles' data. Results are reported chronologically, that is, beginning with results at Period 1h30 (the first testing session for our learners) and concluding with Period 8h00 (the final testing session).