Effets d’un dispositif plurilingue d’enseignement de l’orthographe grammaticale française sur les apprentissages d’élèves du secondaire en milieu pluriethnique et plurilingue

Successive waves of immigrants have turned the province of Quebec into a place of great linguistic and cultural diversity. Thus, many bi/plurilingual students are now attending regular classes in Quebec’s French-language schools, particularly in high school. For these students, learning to write is often a challenge. The grammatical morphology (GM) of French, more specifically, constitutes an important obstacle to the development of their writing skills, an obstacle shared by all students of French regardless of their mother- tongue. Verbal and adjective agreements as well as the choice of verbal endings in /E/ are some of the greatest difficulties (Chevrot, Brissaud & Lefrançois, 2006; Manesse & Cogis, 2007). The present doctoral research aims to contribute to the identification of approaches promoting the learning of the French GM of bi/plurilingual students attending regular high school classes in a multi-ethnic and multilingual environment. In order to address students’ difficulties in a first language learning context, certain teaching practices, such as an integrated approach to teaching spelling and metacognitive dictations, tend to have positive effects on students’ GM development (Allal et al., 2001; Nadeau & Fisher, 2014). In our thesis, we designed an approach inspired by these practices. Furthermore, in order to take into account the specificities of multi-ethnic and multilingual school environments, we integrated plurilingual pedagogical practices to this approach. Those practices are likely to engage bi/plurilingual students in their learning and to promote the development of metalinguistic abilities, in addition to supporting possible transfers between languages (de Pietro, 2003; Moore 2006; Cummins 2009). Thus, we tailored a “plurilingual approach” for teaching French GM. This approach combines the writing of plurilingual identity texts (Cummins & Early, 2011) and metacognitive dictations supported by plurilingual pedagogical practices. Those practices consisted of language awareness activities (Armand, 2014; Auger, 2014) and translinguistic practices (Candelier & de Pietro, 2008; Garcia & Kano, 2014). We verified the hypothesis according to which our plurilingual approach would promote the development of student’s GM in French. To this end, we tested this plurilingual approach with bi/plurilingual first-year secondary students (experimental group 1, n = 79). We then compared its effects with those of a “monolingual approach” for teaching French GM (experimental group 2, n = 70), which combines an integrated approach of teaching spelling and metacognitive dictations, in French only, and with those of usual GM teaching practices (control group, n = 46). We assessed the GM skills of all students through a dictation and a guided written production. Metagraphic interviews with a targeted number of participants from all three groups (in total, n = 24) also provided a deeper understanding of the evolution of their graphical procedures. These data collection tools were used three times: before the experimentation (pre-test), immediately after the experimentation (immediate post-test) and five weeks after the experimentation (delayed post-test). At the end of our research, we found that the plurilingual approach makes a significantly greater contribution to the development of GM in French than usual teaching practices. Moreover, this approach contributes as much, if not more, to this development as the monolingual approach, while the effects specific to the plurilingual approach involve the rooting of the skills learned by students over time. Indeed, at the delayed posttest, only the dictation overall performances of students in experimental group 1 are significantly higher than those of students in the control group. As for written production overall performances, both those in experimental groups 1 and 2 are significantly higher than those in the control group. Finally, using data from the metagraphic interviews, we find a link between the greatest progress in the overall performances of students in experimental groups 1 and 2 and the increase in the use of morphosyntactic procedures and substitution procedures, a trend that does not emerge from the results obtained in the control group.

Keyphrases: Grammatical morphology, Plurilingual approaches, Metacognitive dictations, Integrated approach to teaching spelling, Bi/plurilingual students, Multi-ethnic and multilingual school environments, Language awareness, Translanguaging, Spelling, Writing