Un voyage imaginaire au pays des langues : quand des élèves d’école primaire et des collégiens allophones questionnent leurs représentations des langues

Abstract

This contribution analyses 50 written productions by pupils, at the end of primary school and at the beginning of middle school. The pupils respond to an original fictional writing task such as a language biography, about a character who arrives in the “country of languages” (instruction adapted from Berlou & Dompmartin, 2021).This study is part of a doctoral project that aims at analyzing the appropriation of a didactic engineering by teachers participating in a collaborative research project in France. This engineering proposes plurilingual corpora provoking the comparison of languages, and written production instructions. The field of research includes three types of audience: allophone students from middle school in a specific system for pupils arriving from abroad (named in France UPE2A), “mainstream” classes from a school in an underprivileged area (REP) and from a school in a more affluent area (non-REP).The same writing instruction was proposed before and after the implementation of didactic engineering. In this paper, we analyze the texts by looking for traces of students' representations about languages-cultures and their learning. We study the common features and specificities between the texts of our three audiences (UPE2A, REP, non-REP) as well as the evolutions of these representations between the text before (T1) and after (T2) the plurilingual activities implemented in the classes. Our analysis shows that at T1, the representations of languages and their learning are very different in the 3 groups. At T2, the results of our analyses reveal significant changes: students have representations of languages which are closer to the reality of their usage.

Keywords

• elementary school
• written production
• pluralistic approaches
• didactics of plurilingualism
• allophone pupils in secondary school